Startup Dunia

Criki - yes, you read it correctly (its Criki not Crikey - Steve Irwin’s pet phrase) is a Digg clone that allows users to submit stories and other forms of rich media (audio, video, pictures) related to cricket. The rest of the community then votes for the stories and decides which stories sift to the top. In return, each user earns karma for their votes, comments and submissions. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Criki will be a mashup of popular cricket content found on the web including Live Scores,News, pictures, video, audio etc. Criki’ s content will be driven by the users and will be drawn from the top cricketing sites in the world. Criki provides a snapshot of the content.

I would like to term them as a site that relies on user submitted content rather than user generated content (UGC). UGC, in my perspective, is original content that is generated by the user community.

So anyways, coming back to Criki, they seem to have done a pretty good job at identifying a niche for cloning the Digg idea. The ability for users to submit video, audio and pictures to the site makes it particularly very interesting. There are a few aspects in which they distinguish themselves very well from Digg and the numerous Digg clones out there:

1) Unlike the numerous Digg clones for Indian news, they seem to address a niche

2) They group stories by the type of media submitted with the story. So, stories with no media are grouped together, stories with video in them are grouped together separately and ditto for the stories with pictures. After playing with the site a little bit, it seems that voting in each of these silos is independent from each other. So, for instance, if I vote on a story which has a video in it, this vote will not impact the rating of the stories in the other two silos. If this is not correct, can someone please correct me.

3) Instead of categories, they make use of channels. There’s a channel specific for each country that plays cricket. A user can also create groups, join groups, add friends, delete friends etc.

4) Unlike the other Digg clones, they do not seem to be a Pligg or Meneame fork.

I believe there are several reasons why Criki can become very popular. First and foremost - cricket is an obsession in India. With so many cricket based web sites out there, I’m sure people would love a one-stop shop where they can view and sift through all the latest ongoings in the cricketing world. I, myself, have frequently visited Google video to watch several cricket clips (this was the latest one I found very entertaining).

Criki can be improved further in terms of aesthetics and functionality. But considering that its still in its infancy, I’m sure they’ll evolve with time.

With the arrival of Criki and the already existing Sixer.tv and Crikem, things are surely picking up steam in this area