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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a) Avnish is not deniying FUTURE potential of SN.He clearly said he find little ( i guess basicly economical 🙂 ) or no potential presently.From vc point of view we all will agree that current indian internet market will not ensure 4-5x returns 🙂
b) Nobody doubt social media has lots of scope for customer and enterprises.But still its a media business which requied a mass reach to be profitable like print media.If i am not wrong even youtube is not profitable yet.
Creating niche is attractive but again it hurt the monetization.
@kumar
I am totaly agree with you that potential in social media is limited by imagination.But to some extent potential is will be under-utilised till we have a threshold (kids hanging out!) internet peneteration.
@rahul
indyarocks is just another myspace clone! I still looking for anyting engageing and appealing in any of the Indina social sites.
@Shayam
I am with you when you say “look forward not backward: :)I wish every entreprenuer think in similar way. Indeed we have to create internet market which give solutions for problem local to people here.But buddy this is tough challenge.Its milion times much easier to copy a idea from one part of word and execute it in other part.But desiging a new solution for a new problem is really tough.Starting from scratch in nascent market need lots of social,intellectual,financial capital.We need a different ecosystem .We need lots of peopel trying lots of ideas.More then 200 start-ups are working on future search engine in Bay Area only.World best talent work is in American universities. People drives ideas, innovation,research and market.We have just started lets see how long we take to reach there.
@Nilesh
Sorry I dindt get your logic.There are many ways to improve a service or a product.If Rediff give me better deal the Gmail I will go to Rediff.
Creating a better service or product in one segment is different from creating a “me-too”.
@Amit Rajan
Kudos to you for creating a wonderful web 2.0 product slideshare. One areaa where I disagree with Avnish is when is said there is no future for WEB 2.0 in general in India. Saas, SOA are totally different aspect of web 2.0 from SN. SaaS product scan be targeted to global market and we dont have to bother about Indian internet consumer market. Product like Slideshare have large market, involve expert technology and sufficinet entery barriers whcih makes it a exellent case for VC money.
Problem here is not with Social Media, but it’s with the way they have positioned themselves till date.Currently none of the indian SN sites add any value to the user other than providing some so called cool features(People believe that by using AJAX they’ve done their job).And if one has to use SN just for chatting and scrapping, i think there is no need to move from Orkut to any other site.
True value of Social Media can be derived from the fact that it empowers individual users through collaboration and there can be various creative ways to leverage it.
Why can’t there be a site which allows users to create albums where one user shares the lyrics, other composes the music and third one sings the song.Why can’t we’ve social networks based on specific needs.Why can’t we use Social Media for “Social Shopping” sites like OffersForShoppers ( http://www.offersforshoppers.com ) which helps users to collaborate online and get bigger and better discounts for buying in group.Why can’t we add value to users and help them realise some tangible benefits.
So the crux is that Social Media as a tool has huge potential and it’s usage can be limited only by our imaginations.Just because we’ve not utilised it properly till date doesn’t weaken it’s potential.It’s our responsibility to think beyond the walls and come up with some truly valued services.
An interesting article, in this conetxt and the one I was talking about earlier:
http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/papers/BBook_SoP2.pdf
I had a feeling Avnish’s statement was taken out of context. Good clarification.
I think most of the India specific and otherwise social networking sites coming up are a case of a solution looking for a problem (one that may not even be there ! ).
A community driven/social networking site would make sense and survive only if there is some tangible benefit to the community, the users at large.
Just adding my two cents to what has been an excellent discussion here 🙂