Startup Dunia

When I wrote about IndyaRocks a few days back, I was wondering if this was THE MySpace of India.

After having taken a test ride earlier today, I came away impressed. I think they very well have the potential to rock the Indian social networking scene and challenge Orkut’s reign in the Indian market.

IndyaRocks has been founded by Kalyan Manyam, a 27 year old Hyderabad resident. In his former life, he was head of APAC sales for a US based company and prior to that he founded Innova, a health care technology company. He is an active member of TiE Hyderabad chapter and on the program committee for TiE-ISB connect conference.

On to the review…

Once you’ve created your profile, you’re ready to socialize and build your network. Every user gets access to their own diary (personal scrapbook), Graffiti wall (similar to the Facebook wall or scrapbook in Orkut), calendar, private messaging-inbox, personal bookmarks and of course managing their friends list. Some of the features are very well integrated and add up to a seamless and rich user experience. For instance, when you add friends into your network, their birthdays get automatically added as events on your calendar and you’ll be sent reminders as their birthday approaches. Using the personal bookmarks feature, you can bookmark profiles of other users and keep a track of what they’re upto (Facebook pioneered some of these features).

Besides the Graffiti wall, private messaging and searching / browsing user profiles, they add other dimensions for social interaction - via user blogs, photos, forums and classifieds. As a registered user, you can write your own blog and also browse through other member blogs. You can also subscribe to other member blogs. An integrated Rich Text Editor allows you to embed videos, pictures, smileys, change fonts etc. as part of your blog posts.

They also have a feature rich photo sharing section with support for AJAXy uploads, tagging, privacy controls, photo stream subscriptions, ‘blog this’ for public photos, commenting and rating photos. Thanks to the use of AJAX in the upload form, I was able to upload a couple of photos (~500 KB) within no time.

The forums and classifieds sections are sparsely populated as of yet, considering that they’re still in private beta. Another useful feature integrated into the forums and classifieds is clipping (aka bookmarking). So, you can ‘clip’ the forum posts or classifieds that interest you for viewing later.

SMS based mobile features are also tightly coupled into the site. You can choose to have mobile alerts sent to you when any of your friend sends you a message or posts graffiti on your wall. Similarly, you can reply/post an SMS to your friend by simply sending an SMS to 6263 in the following format:

Ir {username} {msg}

Overall, IndyaRocks provides a great user experience. AJAX usage is not overdone and is used in the right places. At the same time, they do not compromise on the privacy of the user. Fine grained privacy controls are provided to each user - so each user has full control on who gets to see what information. So, for example, you can set the access settings so that only your friends can view your email address. If you do not wish to receive mobile alerts, you can turn them off. You can also customize the appearance and pimp your profile page by adding custom CSS styling to your profile.

They have also launched IRocksLayouts, which users can use to pimp their profile layout and appearance. See below for a pimped up profile:

As per Kalyan, they have a strong mobile strategy in place and some unique features will be launched very soon. In addition, Groups-tribes, photo tools, regional entertainment content are some of the other features in the pipeline.

In terms of features and appearance, they are more similar to Facebook than MySpace. None the less, they’ve done a brilliant job at implementing all the features and very likely will reshape the social networking landscape in the Indian market. Watch out Yaari, Minglebox, Orkut…