The Indian Social Networking Mess

The past year or so has seen the advent of several local social networking sites. There have been TV ads, celebrity endorsements, the occasional local event sponsorship and of course, loads of invite mails in your mailbox. I would typically give a minute or two to some of these sites but have never quite got the rationale for them. Anyways, I decided to have a closer look.

Globally social networking sites are huge traffic generators. According to Alexa - Myspace, Facebook, Orkut and Hi5 are among the 20 most visited sites in the world. Not a single Indian networking site has made the cut to be in the top 1000 sites. Indyarocks and ibibo managed to scrape into the top 100 sites for the Indian audience though.

Traffic ranks of some popular Indian social networks

Essentially for a social networking site to be successful, it should either

1. Compete directly with the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Orkut and have significant advantages for users to convince them to switch. By doing this the new property will be globally competitive.
   OR
   
2. Have strong India specific features which give the sites an edge locally
   

Here is what I felt about some of the players I reviewed -

Bigadda - Expectations were built with the background of this property. The site is owned by Reliance's ADA group and has been getting hype lately from Big B's blog hosted on this site.
My experience on the site started with an "import contacts" tool that did not work at all. I gave my Gmail as well as Orkut account details but could not get any of my contacts to the site with funny authentication errors or with a message that I did not have any contacts!!!!

Bigadda offers vanilla functionality. The 'addas' and forums together give the groups/communities functionality. The site also offers photo sharing, video sharing and blogging capabilities. Blogs lacked layout customizations, photos lacked a bulk upload tool and there was a small size limit to video uploads. The site is painfully slow and clicking on links takes forever. There were categories for Cricket and Bollywood throughout the site but nothing much to write about as far as India specific features are concerned.

This was by far the worst of the 3 sites I reviewed in detail.

Indyarocks - I first got to know of this site when a short movie by our group made it as a finalist to Indyarocks's short film festival. According to the graph above Indyarocks has recently become the most popular Indian social networking site and continues to gain at a swift rate. Indyarocks offers good space and bulk upload tools for videos and photos. The tools did seem to have some glitches though. Interestingly, Indyarocks offers to pay you money for videos that you either upload or see. I have a tendency to not like things that I don't understand though and a site paying me to see as well as to show my videos is definitely something that makes me feel unsure about them.

The site is highly India centric. Send free SMSes to India, chat in rooms on Indian topics, check out local movie listings in a large set of movie halls, Bollywood chit chat, local classifieds. Even the games on the site are India centric - Cricket and Bollywood games!! I can't help but notice that the India specific features offered by Indyarocks are not really related to social networking though. In fact most of these tools are available without logging in and Indyrocks is acting more as an Indian portal than an Indian social network.

Ibibo - The site's irritating "dont be a balti" advertisements introduce the site in bad flavour. The flat, slightly downward user traffic graph(graph on top) despite big advertising budgets second my opinion.

The Indian context of the site is about opinions and polls. While the idea is interesting and relevant, it may not be enough to get the viral growth necessary for social networks to take off. Search on the site is half baked and lacks the ability to correct spelling, look for synonyms and alternate words. The photo section of the site was competitive with top social networking sites with soothing UIs, no absolute upload limits, bulk upload and import tools.

Yaari and Desimartini - I had invites to these sites in my Email and decided to check them out. I sure do regret that decision. There was no easy way for me to add the 8 friends who had sent me invites for Yaari. The email contacts importer was broken and I decided to just stop then and there. Desimartini - they're basically an Orkut clone with a 'fun' section. A section which seemed to have no activity??

Companies and websites can typically be classified in three types, there are ones that are built to last, some are built to sell. Most of the sites I reviewed seemed to fall in the third category, 'built to fail'. With the exception of Indyarocks, which has the potential to be a very good portal for India, the other sites are definitely not among sites that I would like to go to in the foreseeable future.

Verdict on Indian social networks

P.S - Specialized sites for students (notably bharatstudent), professionals, finance or any other specific category have not been covered in this report.