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.
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
social networking sites are evolving and evolution has its ups and downs.
we know we need social networking sites with regional relevance .well be it feature over load or some other issue the basic thing is that it should be appealing and engaging to the users.
i have signed up in this new sns “indyarocks” – check this out and decide for your self
I think there is a lot of confusion here with people throwing around penetration and usage interchangeably. Orkut and Youtube is popular in India, but the uptake is mostly by a tiny percentage of the population.
There _is_ potential here, but there is no mass adoption for sure now and conceptually I’ve not seen anything yet that addresses the specifics of the Indian market. For instance, everyone is doing a Youtube or a Digg clone, but how many have actually bothered to localise any of it? There is a wealth of local language content in print and being published in India, that probably represents the best of the Long Tail in Web 2.0, but who is doing aything to get that online?
Of course, there are strong revenues in the Indian internet sector right now whatever Web x.x that you want to talk about, but it is still not a patch on what other traditional segments are making these days. And I think Sramana Mitra said it best when she wrote “let me propose that Indian entrepreneurs start looking at the trends that would shape the US market in the next 5 years. Let’s look forward, not behind.”
And I largely agree with that premise. What is there right now is not what will help unlock the potential in our vast numbers. By the time that populace, who’s largely offline now, will come online and who knows we might even be doing Web 20.0 at that time. I guess what Avinash Bajaj wanted to say (yeah, I am mind reading there), was something similar, that we have tremendous potential, but we ain’t there yet and it certainly won’t be web 2.0 that will unlock it.
I tend to agree with the comments on Web 2.0. Infact it is a very data driven kind of point and so is largely undisputable.
But another way to look at it is:
How many people from India have time on their hands and a broadband connection at home? While this number is miniscule compared to India’s population, is this number in itself larger than any of the smaller countries where internet community building has successfully worked? Does this Indian sub-segment share sufficient traits in common to be able to form communities online?
If answer to all of the above is yes, (which I think it is), there is some scope for online communities in India. The local flavour would be to cater to the common thread mentioned above…
Mohit
That’s why I said – Indians don’t hang around *generally* – you need to “solve a pain/provide some gain” for junta to start participating in these nets
I mentioned the same in one of the presentations made @ barcamp.
Apart from buried info, you need to provide a platform for gossips. and that’s why orkut rocks.
http://www.pluggd.in/2007/03/social-networking-in-india-where-is.html
What do others think?
“Avnish is right when he says we culturally are not a land of “loners” with a compelling need to network. ”
I think SN can be used to solve many more problems rather than just networking.
Let’s take for example a SN in which people are sharing things ( books, DVDs) etc. Now if I need to read the Book xyz I can easily search who in my network has this book for share. Rather than pinging everybody and asking “Do you have the book xyz?” this SN can easily give me information saving time and energy.
Another example could be an SN based on share trading. Each user builds a profile in which he is recommending his pick for the week,month etc. Now such an SN can provide a huge amount of information. I can see how many people in my network are recommending infosys today! and stuff like that.
Basically, my point is SN is not only a network of people but also a network of burried information.
I would love to hear comments on this.