The rise of Social Networking Sites in India

If there is any revolution that is taking place in the India online space, it is the rise of Social Networking Sites (SNS)

There is an explosion of users registering on the popular social networking sites. Orkut boasts of almost 8.5 Million users of Indian origin. Orkut had close to 7.2 Million unique visitors from India during June ’07.

According to Comscore – during the same period Facebook had close to .78 Million unique visitors, and Myspace had close to .4 Million UV on their site.

Our very own homegrown SNS like minglebox, bharatstudent.com, and yaari.com, has substantial users

The number of Active Internet users in India is safely assumed at 22 Million. Would it mean that every 2nd Indian is having their profile in one of the popular Social Networking Sites?

Internet is now no longer an information highway. It is becoming a platform for conversations. But the big question is how many are talking and how many are listening? We Indians by nature are very expressive people. We communicate a lot, to mean a little. We love to tell stories; we love to listen to stories. We people are curious lot. Many of the conversations start with a – Did you know…..

But we as a community are mostly verbal. If we look at our history, we had an oral tradition of school. Writing was never our forte. Looking back into my childhood – none of my friends, or people I know ever kept a dairy. Well, many of them, including yours truly, started writing one, during the summer holidays. But they never seem to go beyond 10 pages. Then how come that this phenomenon of SNS is becoming such a rage in India?

I strongly feel, that this is a phenomenon of a few, being hyper-active in the SNS space. There would of course be a lot of users there just for being ‘cool’, or to be part of the ‘in’ thing.

Whether it is Orkut, Facebook, or Myspace – all are targeting to same demography - Teenagers and college students. So are other SNS like – Friendster, Bebo, Hi5, etc. All offer similar services – post messages, upload files, photos, groups and classifieds. Where then is the USP. What would differentiate one SNS from another?

As it is written in the book – may your tribe grow

Incidentally, I too have an Orkut profile… I just do not remember why I created one, and what I plan to do with it… I kind of feel tough updating this blog of mine.. forget about having any other thing to do. For now, I will stick to LinkedIn.

Santosh

PS: I have a great idea to start a platform (similar to meebo); wherein I can logon and exchange messages with different SNS J

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