Indian Social Networking Sites

06Apr08

Social networking sites are new craze in the online advertising. Facebook, Myspace and Orkut are new craze among online communities. These websites are among the top 10 websites today in the world in terms of traffic.

As internet is becoming more affordable among Indians, more Indians are registering them selves with the Indian Social Networking websites. Indian demography is also favorable to the popularity of these websites. Orkut is the most popular social networking website in India. But orkut is not an Indian website. In last two years, a lot of new sites have come up to target Indian users. These sites are made specially for Indian community. Now, it has been more than two years since most of these websites came on Indian Internet space so I am going to analyze these websites. Let us see that what is future of Indian social networking websites. I have tried to analyze four websites on this blog. These websites are Yaari, BigAdda, Fropper and Desimartini.

First let us see that how they have performed in last one year. I have used “traffic” and “pageviews” as parameters to compare these websites.

Clearly BigAdda is picking up among all these 4 websites. Now let us compare these websites in terms of pageviews.

Above graph shows that all of these websites are loosing momentum. More people are coming on these websites but they are seeing less pages on these websites. This is not a good sign for Indian social networking websites. I also wanted to have an experience of these websites so I registered on these websites.

YAARI : Yaari is hindi word for friendship. Name of the company provides Indian touch to social networking sites. It was started by Prerna Gupta in June 2005.

Positives:

• Hindi name
• Provides free mobile scrapping
• Gives i-pod free (How long can you attract traffic by distributing i-pods)

Negatives:

• Ugly looking website
• Google Advertisements scattered all over the place
• Received bad publicity for email spamming
• Do not see any connection to Indian-ness on the website

VERRDICT:

This website can not sustain itself in the long term. I think that this is destined to die in near future.

BIGADDA:

Bigadda (Adda means place in Hindi) is funded by Reliance (Anil Ambani). This website obviously has big money and funded by big guys.

Positives:

• Well developed web-site
• Nice design and UI
• Has all the features such as photo/video/music/addas/forums/blogs

Negatives:

• Do not see a context or theme for content
• Not enough things that culturally or personally show Indian-ness
• Slow
• I would love to see features such as : when you write the name of your school then it shows that there are already x members of this school/class registered…

Verdict:

• Nice design, better UI, and has all the required features for successful social networking site
• This website is here to stay because it is supported by reliance
• They should create a theme (context) and should organize content with the theme
• They need to do a lot of innovation and add features that make it Indian social networking websites if they want to compete with Orkut and other social networking sites

Fropper:

Fropper is started by the guys who own Shaadi.com. This web site’s focus is on relationship/dating/marriage.

Positives:

• Being focussed always pays – I think that this is a good move towards making a vertical social networking site
• Partner Program – This can go a long way in getting the right kind of traffic
• Relationships/dating/friendship – These are hot issues for Indian demography
• Supported by Shaadi.com

Negatives:

• Pay money to chat with the online members

VERDICT

• Focus on “relationships” and young Indian crowd will make this site successful

Desimartini

This website has been sold to HT by its founders. But I do not think that HT has done any thing after buying the website. I do not know what is HT’s strategy for the future of this community site

Positive:

• Have games / fun on the site
• Have all the basic features that are needed for the community website

Negative:

• How does this site fits with HT’s web strategy
• Site says that 18 yr and older are allowed to be a member of this website but I could login with my DoB in 1993 …This is ridiculous

Verdict:

• Depends on HT’s web strategy

One more thing that I want to focus is “Terms and Policy” on any website. Please read them before registering yourself on any website. Here are some examples:

Yaari.com

1. The email address(es) that you supply to use this service will only be used to send invitations to connect with you on Yaari. By registering for the Yaari website, and by giving Yaari member’s email address and password, a member agrees to the Terms of Service and consents to allow Yaari to automatically send an email from the member to member’s contacts, encouraging member’s contacts to register for the Yaari website. Invitation emails will be sent on member’s behalf, with the ‘from’ address set as member’s email address. Yaari will never store member’s email password.

2) Notice Regarding Commercial Email

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM YAARI, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY YAARI FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.

Although Yaari does not claim ownership of content that its Member’s may provide to Yaari, by providing content to Yaari, Members automatically grant, and represent and warrant that they have the right to grant, to Yaari a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, and fully sublicenseable, license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute said content.

DESIMARTINI.com

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. DesiMartini.com reserves the right to use your mobile and demographic information such as age, sex and location to conduct targeted mobile marketing campaigns even for third parties wishing to advertise using our database. DesiMartini.com also reserves the right to sell this information and also the entire site to a third party if a third party is desirous of purchasing this information.

Filed under: Internet, Social networking   |  7 Comments
Tags: Social networking