This is the first of a two part post on the state and the state-of-the-art in social network platforms in India and across the world.
Social networks have been a rage all over the world, that is, till recently when most people seem to be suffering from social networking fatigue. Social networks have also evolved both in India and across the world to cope with competition and the lack of a business model.
Networking Niches
Most Indian social networking sites started out as plain vanilla networking sites such as Yaari, DesiMartini, Fropper and BigAdda. A few of them such as Minglebox had the foresight to quickly evolve from a general networking site to a more focussed networking destination. A quick run by Alexa comparing networking sites focussed on particular segments of users (such as students that are targeted by both BharatStudent and Minglebox) to sites such as BigAdda, Yaari and Fropper shows that focussed sites are doing better in terms of reach and rankings.
Considering that the worldwide leader Facebook with 300 million plus users makes under 200 million dollars in annual revenues, the business potential of social networks in India with around 20 million registered users (including Orkut, Facebook and LinkedIn) can very well be estimated to be under 20 million dollars in annual revenues which does not make for great business opportunity.
Interestingly, perhaps taking a cue from LinkedIn which is probably the only social network that turns a good profit, a few Indian networking sites such as TechTribe and Brijj are targeting verticals such as jobs supported by professional interactions and financial incentives (for example, share of referral fees). Others I have observed are centred around areas of interests such as those for movies (Chakpak), music (Muziboo) and work places (Criticat, JobeeHive). Both Muziboo and JobeeHive are startups and presented at Startup Saturdays and I will post their details separately.
Application platforms
Facebook started it off last year with the Facebook application platform and Google followed up with OpenSocial that most other networks such as Hi5, MySpace, Ning and Friendster have adopted. These efforts are aimed at making application platforms out of social networks. For application developers, these bring a large mass of users to new applications and for social networks, these applications make users stay on the site for much longer.
The only Indian company that I have observed has come up with an applications platform play is Rediff. Rediff does not have a social network (apart from Sociali which appears to be an applications sandbox more than a social network that they launched last week) but operate blogs named iLand which could very well be enabled with social widgets that are developed using the Rediff applications platform. Other products such as iShare and Rediff Shopping are also potential areas Rediff could introduce social widgets in. Rediff has already made an attempt in introducing social features to the Rediffmail inbox.
Despite efforts to engage a social network’s existing audience with applications, business models still look flaky. So far, it has been a run to grab more and more users but this is set to change soon. More on this on the next post on the state-of-the-art in social networks.
Very nice article on social network..