State of Social Networking Sites in India

According to Internet market research firm comScore Inc., the country had 34.6 million Internet users (who access the Web from their homes/offices) in June, of which at least 65%, or 22.61 million, accessed social networking sites. This is a trend that is in line with the global trend,where social networks and blogging sites have dislodged personal email in the hierarchy of the online world (Nielsen 2009).

Social networking sites started gaining traction in India some three years back with the rising popularity of global sites Facebook and Orkut.Soon, Indian sites caught on; Ibibo.com, Indyarocks.com, Bharatstudent.com and Bigadda.com emerged.Today a dozen and more Indian websites exist. The Indian Social Networking scene is suddenly a hot cake and everyone wants a piece of it.There are atleast 12 or more websites in the mrket.

However,the two global first-movers —Orkut and Facebook—account for at least 90% of the market, according Gartner India. That leaves very little headroom for the “others” to partake their audience and advertisers. The Social media story is likely to pan out into a lot more fringe players in the next 1 or 2 years before the ineviatble shake out happens. Everyone is experimenting with different things (to make money from advertising). Some things will work; some things won’t.

“A big percentage (of these networks) will not survive.” says Ashish Kashyap, CEO at Ibibo, a social networking site that has positioned itself as a talent-showcasing platform. “There is no space for ‘me toos’…you have got to differentiate and solve a problem.”

From the first estimate of a user myself, Differentiation and Stickiness would be based on the following factors:

1. Site Followers: Users and Content beget more users and better content. While the threshold for a site business model would vary on many factors, it is important that target volume users are met within a optimum time frame.

2. Rich user experience at the site which would include real time communication, Chat, Applications,Video, Audio, Games,Blogs, User generated contents and reviews and more.

3. Site USP: The age old paradigm of positioning the platform will be crucial in establishing the site audience and stickines.

4. Relevant content and user discussion/interaction on subjects.

5. Accessibility through Mobile Texting / internet mediums: The best exmaple of this is the Facebook mobile which allows users to access a lite version of Facebook for the mobile phones. Better still are user updates through SMS texting on their mobile phones, which is also being used as a key service proposition by a few Telecom operators.

6. Content localization/Vernacularization: While most of the internet users are urban and the medium of communication is thus English, India being India, the importance of vernacular content would be an important volume builder in times to come.

7. Celebrity endorsers: When BigAdda had to launch, all it did was to sign up Amitabh Bachchan as a blogger on its network. Traffic on the site multiplies (though most of the ecelebrity blogs are actually quite unreadable and narcissist in my opinion.

8. Building Communities around the content and the website

9. Content co-creation with the user

A Movement called Twitter

For an internet portal just two years in existence, the amount of news that Twitter has been making is like nothing ever before in the history of communications. Sample this:

The micro-blogging site has featured in Time some days back
Oprah Winfrey is the latest celebrity tweeting on the already huge celebrity list of Twitter
Iranians turned to the service to protest the results of their presidential election and get the news out …
… if that wasn’t enough, the importance of the San Francisco-based startup was underlined by the US State Department, which asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance shutdown on Monday because of the situation in Iran.
Reacting to the Iran situation, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said, “It’s humbling to think that our two-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance.”
Access to the popular social networking service was blocked across mainland China on Tuesday afternoon, two days before the 20th anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown following calls for a re-evaluation of the protest movement that have been published on the Internet, and may have prompted the black-out
Twitter has been adding millions of users a month for the past several months and its website received 32.1 million unique visitors in April, according to comScore.
#cnnfail hashtag on Twitter, came out as a result of Twitter users venting out their frustration on CNN for not giving enough coverage to the Iran incident. CNN had to issue an official response to the allegations.

The actual number of users of the micro-blogging service is hard to figure since Twitter can be accessed using personal computers, mobile telephones and dozens of custom-built applications such as the popular Tweetdeck.
The Twitter co-founders have reportedly passed up offers running into the hundreds of millions of dollars for the service and have so far only unveiled vague plans to turn it into a money-making venture.
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist whose firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Twitter, made it clear at the Twitter conference in New York on Tuesday that he believes Twitter has a bright— and profitable — future.“Links are the currency of the Internet,” Wilson, who sits on Twitter’s board of directors, told the 140 Characters Conference.
“If you look at the power of Google, and why Google is currently the king of the Internet, it’s that Google drives more traffic to more places on the Internet than anybody else,” he said.
“Social media, particularly systems like Twitter and Facebook that are good at driving traffic out into the Internet the same way that Google does are very important and powerful economic forces,” Wilson said.“It’s a natural thing for services like Twitter and Facebook to eventually figure out how to inject some sort of a paid model into their systems.“It’s the obvious thing to do and if they don’t do it some one will figure out how to do it as a third-party application, and people are already doing it as third-party applications,” he said.
John Borthwick, whose company Betaworks is among the hundreds that have developed tools for Twitter, said it is this “incredibly vibrant ecosystem of applications” surrounding Twitter that is one of its strengths.
Jeff Pulver, organizer of the 140 Characters Conference, said it is too early to tell exactly where Twitter is going, but “I think what we’re experiencing is something that’s much bigger than all of us understand.We’re living in a time where access to information is available to anyone and everyone,” said Pulver, a web entrepreneur. “The advent of Twitter has democratized access to information to everyone.
“When more and more people have real-time information we’re going to see transformations happen that no one expected,” he said. “Businesses will fail, others will flourish and there will be billions of dollars of opportunity created.”

The impact that this 2 year old micro blogging site seems to have in real time world is scary and there is little wonder that Google wants to either buy out or partner Twitter. Twitter’s ascent would not leave Google very comfortable. Would it?

Reference: http://www.livemint.com/2009/06/17131454/From-Time-to-Oprah-to-Iran-Tw.html?h=B
http://www.livemint.com/2009/06/03121331/China-blocks-Twitter-ahead-of.html?d=2
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/5351937/Google-chief-hints-at-partnership-with-Twitter.html
http://www.watblog.com/2009/06/18/the-iran-controversy-and-the-importance-of-social-media-communications/

Guardian Open Platform: The launch

An addendum to my earlier blog post about Guardian's Open Platform initiative. http://technologyandtelecom.blogspot.com/2009/03/harnessing-open-source-to-power-next.html

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Harnessing Open Source to power the next level of Business: The Guardian's Open Platform initiative

In the age of open source and democratization of content it is just time before newspapers and news agencies join the open platform and social networking as a means to stay relevant. The challenge is to customize the business model around these to make money even while they reinvent the rules of the game. Guradin, The UK based newpaper has taken its first step in this direction by launching what they call the "Open Platform". While all newspapers have a blogs, content and online presence, Guradian's venture is different.

What guardian plans is to open up millions of of pieces of content: Stories, Photos, Slideshows and data sets to all who want to process all this data through web applications and mashups etc. In its present avataar, all this is Guradian's core product, which Guardian shall open up to the internet for free! Why would someone do that?

Three reasons:

1. Guardian plans to use this channel to push advertising. In effect, by being a host to users, developers and applications, it is creating a captive base and it will push advertising feeds into this outlet as well. This thus becomes an extremely scalable way to increase ad inventories and at some stage Guardin will venture out into targetted advertising through API (application programming interface). That like creating a new G Mail and adsense.

2. Opening up all its content inventory would attract a whole bunch of programmers and developers to this platform which would nurture innovations around the core product. In an age where news feeds are so commoditized, innovations from an open source can pep up the channel offering. All this development at zero cost. Developers have already started throwing up interesting results. API maps matches news content with locations aroudn the world to create a crowd sourced geo tagged database of news. Content Tagger allows users to create web tag on Guardian database.

3. If nothing else works out, the effort is going to create branded content and applications, at no incremental cost. With no incremental costs again, Guardian will probably create plenty of new consumers and a new level of brand awareness.

All in all, an interesting piece of work, which would give us reasons and ideas on what works and what doesnot in terms of Monetizing efforts around the social networking platform in this age of Web 2.0 and Freetardonomics.

Social context in Applications: Is Google missing in action?

Search Engines are now a way of life with Internet addicts. While there is Google and Google only, there are others like Yahoo, MSN, Cuill, Ask and many others. I am a Google fan and on one occassion had told my wife, there is Internet and there is Google!

Of late, Google seems to have fallen back in terms of Search. Not in terms of market share, not in terms of volumes, not in terms of efficacy or any optimised results! It is the social context that Google has started missing.

http://forums.techarena.in/web-news-trends/1114191.htm: This news feed was featured some time back and essentially speaks about Ziva Software's application for mobile search, Zook coming together with Nokia! This addresses a huge potential market of mobile search applications. With more and more people opting to use Internet on the go on their mobiles, a search feature is a very apt application. Loaded as a widget (the name of a icon which features the application on the menu screen), these mobile search applications can will massify "SEARCH"!

So what, i said to myself, you can also load a Google Search Icon on your mobile and use it for search. But there lies the catch. A socially optimzed search will not only "search" but also prompt solutions intutively. As an illustration, if i do a "Italian Food Joints + Connaught Place" search on Google and a Social context optimized search engine, Google will generate the list and throw it back at me in no time. The Socially optimised search will generate the list, understand relevance of Restaurants (which means i need to eat --> hence may require booking) and intutively given me an option, "Book a Table?". I can take the browser on Book a table and click on it so that i would directly talk to the Restaurant manager! Two Clicks.

On a Google, i would get the results, click on the result, figure out the telephone number, write it down ona piece of paper and then call the restaurant. Thats 3 clicks + manual work. Thats one click and a lot of hassle too many!

Kudos to Zook for having done that now! But with size and might of Google, it may turn it around any day now. Zook will have some days and time and distance to go before it thoroughly integrates all content like Google. But so long, for Social aware context applications, is the way, it is to be.