India finally seems to be responding to viral marketing. After Orkut that seems to have taken off on back of viral marketing, last month Tagged.com showed a brilliant run (globally, but in India as well – its Alexa 33 for India already) on back of suck-email-addresses-and-send-invites functionality. Some of the local social networking sites also seem to be headed for critical mass.
The manner in which Orkut took off seems to be very different from Tagged.com though. Orkut seemed more organic unlike the mass messaging style of Tagged.com. Earlier, I believe hi5 had followed the same path. While this helps create quick base of users, wanted to get people’s views on what really makes them stick? What is the set of “local features” that Indian social networking sites can create to provide a superior offering to Indian consumers? One of the clear answers seem to be mobile interface to site functionality. The other one perhaps is local content such as bollywood. However, community is the central product of a social network, and that gets created automatically on a site as you get more people on.
Would love to hear from folks here on what they think is the killer app on social networking, which is their favorite network and why?
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Thanks Sanjay !
That can be optional, but my point was, whether there a market for such a tool which enables people to connect with their privacy being protected? The tool will just match based on your expertise(which it can determine or you just tell it)
Y! answers is something like that, but its more like a broadcast. This is one to one communication and others need not know that you have answered that question !
Kencha:
Whoa! NO!
As if Spyware and Google (well, Gmail) knowing about my email and throwing ads at me was not enough…
No, I don’t want any application to scan my emails..
I doubt if many users would want that to happen _knowingly_
Hi Alok,
For the first time, I came to know about YouTube and Orkut, while reading Jan Isuse of TIME mag. My 9 year old son was surprised to know that I have not heard of these…. Later I found out,he is visiting these sites for over 6 months ..
Possibly, the answer of “the new killer app?” will come from analysing needs/requirements/life-style of young generation .. 10 – 25 years of age.
Its great to read your blogs.
ravi
Folks,
On a similar note, I would appreciate your feedback whether this will work in India.
How about a tool which runs as a client and helps you to connect people based on similar interest? We have a client which scans your email(and any other input) and determines your area of expertise and helps you to connect to other people looking for that kind of expertise. It is like intelligent matching, but privacy protected.
All communication is encrypted.
Do users in India attach importance to privacy?
I am not sure how many social networking sites are ACTUALLY making some revenue. Just a VC favourite because there are big players who want to grab anything that comes along that says “social networking”
I doubt if there will be even 10% of the existing members if orkut made users to pay for the services.
Extending ad-words type advertising may work for some of the social networking sites. (like linkedin)….but I still cant think of ways in which sites like twitter can make money….