Just saw this article from Avnish, Matrix Partners. Avnish, I know you are around somewhere on venturewoods, so please do participate in this friendly discussion!
A followup would be unnecessary if I agreed with this statement. However, I must say that I myself do believe that the “kids hanging out” variety of social networks are premature in India. These businesses are essentially media businesses, and reach and engagement levels are the key metrics. Besides the internet penetration being low in the country, kids are not spending hours at end on the internet — the engagement levels simply arent there as yet. The only hope for these is a strong and simple mobile addon.
And now for the exciting part — some social networks will fly in India, IMHO. I believe these will be driven by specific tangible benefits, rather than being “hangouts”. I will afford a couple of examples. The first one is referral based recruitments. The Indian e-recruitment technology is 10 years old (no, there are no company wars here! I mean this across the board.) Global sites like linkedin, simplyhired, jobster and so on have demonstrated how social networking can be tied into recruiting very effectively. The Indian model is going to be different from these, and I believe there is a significant market there.
The second example that I would afford is networks for buying services (I am yet to see a good model around product ecommerce) — services are intangible, and often very fragmented. Think of hiring a printer for printing visiting cards. These selections are essentially social in nature, and I believe translating them to the web will be productive.
I am sure there are a lot more examples — social internet is waiting to be discovered in India. And like any other business, the customer is a good place to start from.
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@rahul
um…nope :-),
Iqbal
Iqbal
R u talking about http://www.linkedzone.com ? I got an invitation to join it and it seems similar to what you are saying.
Hi
Guys in my opinion social does not work…why because how many friends can a human maintain …a handful, even if the tools are there, look in your inbox, how many people do you actually send emails to…i.e jokes etc, we talk to the masses via mailing lists, not because we know all of them, trust me if we had to type in everyones email address we would get to about 5 and then stop.
Social networks worked because they ALL had a purpose, and this I dont believe was about making friends, that happened as a after thought. Social networks have been around since TCPIP was invented, we had usenet, we had egroups, we had mailing lists, we have forums etc etc, these are all social, just that you did not have a friends profile, but usually you got to know them via email.
So all these like todays successful one ALL had a purpose, in India they do NOT have a purpose, they are all trying to make each other into friends.
I just cannot see why 2.5 million people from india will move from orkut to any other social network..if someone else can…like to know what I missed.
Iqbal
P.S
As for jobsites, I am so tempted to post a URL here…but my right hand is being stopped by my left….there is a jobsite by referral being built in India, its in stealth, and all I can say its different, i.e its not social….its has a small team, and is self funded, I wish I could say more…its been delayed the algorithms to sort out value of network have not been easy, and neither has been the visual display (UI in india is really poor)…4-6 weeks…and hopefully some money….www….(aaarghhhh)
Very interesting article :
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_expansion_of_social_networks.php#more
satpal parmer-
iam not sure if we can brush off indyarocks as just another clone of myspace.In fact myspace is it self a clone friendster.
i believe any sns or online community thrives on one aspect- connecting people with similar intrests.irocks is still in private beta and they seem to be testing their basic platform(with which iam prettymuch impressed).lets just wait for a while and see what they really have to offer.
yes i do agree with the BIGQUESTION – why do we need one more sns in india where there is orkut.
mean while check out this intresting discussion
http://www.pluggd.in/2007/04/startup-juice-interview-with-founder_09.html