Orkut Apps - Indian apps dominate
Its been almost three months since Orkut apps went live. It seemed like a good time to visit and review some of the most popular Orkut apps and see how well they’re faring.
Orkut has the largest Indian audience amongst all social networks and not surprisingly, it seems that Indian apps seem to the dominate the top 10 list. At the time of this writing, six out of the top 10 Orkut apps were either targeted towards the Indian audience or were built by Indian companies.
Lets look at three of the most popular Orkut apps below:
Chakpak Movies: This Erasmic funded company’s Orkut app seems to have caught up with Indian Orkutters like wildfire. Install the app and you can rate - review movies, view celebrity wallpapers, compare movie tastes with friends etc. One of the most popular and engaging features of this app is the quizzes — I’ve seen so many friends within my own social graph taking the Chakpak movie quiz.
As per Chakpak folks, below are stats related to their app:
Number of app installs: about 0.5 million users have installed the app
Average daily signups: 20 - 25 10,000 - 20,000 average new signups daily
Time spent on the app (engagement): exact number not provided, but in the lower double digit minutes (ie, between 10-20 minutes)
Read more
IndyaRocks launches Eros Entertainment channel, integrates Google Maps
IndyaRocks has partnered with Eros Entertainment to launch a branded community channel. The deal is a win-win scenario for both parties involved - IndyaRocks gets access to new, interesting content related to movies and for Eros, this is just another channel for movie promotion and branding.
Eros Entertainments YouTube channel is here.
IndyaRocks will also launch another feature next week, where all your friends can be plotted on a map. This gives a nice perspective of how your social graph is geographically spread across the world, and you can find - make friends based on a particular region.
The top open source social networking platforms
Here’s a list of some of the most promising open source social networking platforms for those of you who might be interested.
1) BuddyPress
BuddyPress was started by Andy Peatling as a series of plugins for WordPress MU that will turn it into a fully functional social network. It was acquired by AutoMattic, founders of WordPress, and has been launched as a standalone open source project. Features include extended profiles, personal blogs, messaging, friends, groups, albums etc. Few of these features have been launched already while several others are under active development.
While BuddyPress still has a long way to go, it definitely seems to be the most promising open source social networking platform out there. Not only do the founders have the success of WordPress under their belt, the total number of active WordPress installs provides a ready made base for BuddyPress installs as well.
2) Insoshi
Insoshi is a Ruby on Rails based, open source social networking project and has been incubated by YCombinator. Michael Hartl, the founder, is the author of Railspace: Building a Social Networking Website with RoR. While Insoshi is also under active development, current feature set includes activity feeds, extended profiles with comment walls, friends, forums, blogs, messaging etc.
While Insoshi is awesome, one of the aspects that probably may hamper public adoption is that the project is RoR based and there still arent enough folks with RoR skills (I speak relative to number of folks with PHP skills).
Is Facebook India launching soon ?
Is Facebook India launching sometime soon ?
It appears that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg is in India currently, as evident from contents of an internal letter published by TechCrunch today. So, what is he doing in India ? Could it be related to an impending India launch ?
After all, MySpace India officially launched a few weeks back. And even though Facebook grew at a much higher rate in India, it considerably lags Orkut - the social networking leader in the Indian market. Probably, Facebook wants to counter these attempts and enter the market before its too late to the party.
If you have any tips, feel free to leave them in the comments or drop me an email.
Desiji - Yet Another Social network for Indians
As if there arent enough social networks already competing for the Indian audience, Desiji is yet another social network targeted towards Indians.
The site has the regular fan fare you’d normally expect from a social network such as user profiles, friends, groups/networks, events, videos, classifieds etc.
As per the founders, here’s how they think they’re different:
1) We think Indian as a global then just a local
2) Offer 1 to 1 as well as 1 to Many peer social networking just made for Indian
3) Concept : “Connect, Share, Market”.
Users connect by joining unique concept called Network, which could be
1) regional 2) school 3) college 4) professional and 5) group/interest
4) Focused on Indian between age 15-65
Honestly, I dont think these are any differentiation factors at all. I think Desiji does not have the extra punch that would be needed to compete in a market dominated by Orkut, Facebook et. al. Lets see how long they can stay alive and take a shot at the Indian social networking market.
Amitabh blogs on BigAdda - what a shitty gimmick from BigAdda
Scene 1, Take N:
Execs at BigAdda, R-ADAG’s social networking site, nervously thinking of ways to counter MySpace India’s launch.
Exec 1: “Quick…We need something to counter PR efforts from MySpace India’s launch today. Can we pull off a rabbit from the hat ? ”
Exec 2: “Hey, why not ask Amitabh Bachchan (who happens to be Anil Ambani’s buddy) to start a blog on BigAdda ? It seems really creative and will help counter MySpace India’s announcement.”
Exec 1: “But will it work ? Will BigB be open to the idea of blogging ?”
Exec 2: “Who cares ? We’ll have what we need to make big announcement for the day.”
So, BigAdda comes up with the shitty idea of having Amitabh Bachchan to start a blog.
The entire concept seems to have been put together in a jiffy in a totally lame manner. Here’s why:
1) Even though BigAdda has a ‘blogs‘ section of its own, the BigB blog is hosted on a separate, WordPress MU install.
2) If you want, you can join BigB and sign up for your own blog on BigAdda - click here to signup - and then flaunt to your mom-GF that you blog alongside BigB. Apparently, the WordPress install is configured to accept signups - see the screenshot below (click for bigger version):
More on this topic in follow up post tomorrow.
Startup Updates: Improved Lipik.in, IndyaRocks goes mobile, Burrp TV launches
Lipik.in, which I’d covered earlier, has just launched several new, interesting features. To begin with, they have added support for Punjabi, Kannada and Tamil and several other languages are planned for this year. They have also added support for searching the web using multilingual queries - a super cool feature. Below is a screenshot showing search results for the term महातà¥à¤®à¤¾. They have also added support for Blogger - so, you can directly post your Indic content, authored on Lipik, to your Blogger account.
I’m a firm believer in localization of content to Indian languages, and I think Lipik is taking the right steps in that direction. Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.
Meanwhile, IndyaRocks keeps its innovation engine humming. They’ve released a mobile version of the site, which can be accessed at http://m.indyarocks.com. Almost all the features of the online version - people search, browser profiles, friend requests, messaging, graffiti wall, SMS - are available in the mobile version too. Meanwhile, they also launched friend updates (friend feed) for the online version.
MySpace India launching this week
As per a CNET story, MySpace India will be launching later this week. This follows its public launch of MySpace Korea.
The India launch will be accompanied with a developer hackathon in Bangalore and a rock concert in Taj Land’s End Amphitheater, Mumbai. And MySpace India beta will launch as English only site.
I just checked the MySpace India page and it is live here.
So, what do you think ? Will the MySpace India launch cause a dent to Orkut’s domination and Facebook’s rise in the Indian market ?
Or is Myspace India too late in the game ?
India Social Media marketing - Using Orkut
Despite the fact that the Indian online population is small, they have latched onto social media pretty early. Social networking sites and blogs are the most popular forms of social media, with a large following from the Indian online audience.
- As of June last year, Orkut had 7.2 million unique visitors from India. Facebook had 0.78 million unique visitors, with a month over month surge of a whopping 230% (via AgencyFaqs)
- Assuming that India has 24 million Internet users, this means that about 30% of the Indian Internet users have used Orkut.
- Blogs have turned out to be shockingly popular - 85% of the online Indian users read blog
- Thats almost 20 million Indian Internet users
So, when it comes to digital marketing in India, are Indian marketers warming up to the social media phenomenon ?
In this multi-part series, I’m planning to pick each of the five channels (Orkut, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, brand websites) and discuss various marketing initiatives by Indian companies in each channel.
Advertising - Marketing on Orkut:
Several Indian companies were advertising on Orkut via AdWords, which Google had integrated into Orkut a short while ago. However, rising problems, mainly cultural, forced Google to remove ads from Orkut.
India Gaming market: Nunook, an awesome, Indian social gaming network
The Indian gaming market seems to be on a roll lately - FX labs launched their PC game Agni, Trine Studios launched Streets of Mumbai, IndyaRocks launched their casual gaming section.
Nunook would be the latest buzz in the Indian gaming market. They are a cool, new social network for casual Indian gamers. You can play games without signing up on the site, but the point system on Nunook is tightly integrated into the other aspects of the site.
Each time you play a game, you earn points. This in turn, increases your ‘achievement level’ on the site. The higher the level, the more access you get to exclusive content on the site. Points not only get you access to exclusive content, they also enable you to change avatars, and buy collectibles - aka virtual goods. In other words, they earn you bragging rights. Simply put, points are the currency on Nunook.
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