Hello World!

Thats the line most people are taught to print on screen when they first learn any programming language. I’m a programmer by heart, hobby and profession and hence I say hello this way :)

Anyway, earlier this day, I read a post on Pluggd.in related to the threat that the OpenSocial implementation on Orkut could pose to Indian Social Networking startups (for non-techies, just understand it as the Orkut Application platform like the Facebook platform). And that post coincidently matched my view (in the comment) in the previous post related to BigAdda’s flop show, that Indian Social Networking sites need to get ready to match Orkut’s offering or add another grave in the already populated Internet-Graveyard :)

Before shouting out my opinion on what Indian Socionets can do to survive. I would like to mimic Clint Eastwood’s famous one-liner “Do ya feel lucky… punk?”. Well do you guys?

Below are a few points on how you can crash into the social networking scene with steaming success. I have considered only a few of the main players into consideration below.

1.) Technical Knowledge: Most Indians lack technical knowledge of HTML and related stuff, which most have in the western countries, so they won’t turn to MySpace. So most won’t appreciate any feature like editing the HTML of your profile.

2.) User Exprience: MySpace is a clutter. They don’t seem to care about User Experience and hence their site design seems to follow the “Anything Goes!” philosophy. Facebook’s design is too complex for newbies to understand. Infact the first time I visited it, it frightened me off. They have too much of data on each page. Orkut’s site design is good and easy to use, but as a developer I have used their sandbox for testing applications for their application platform coming soon. I can surely assure you that they too have screwed up their site’s design with apps. They don’t seem to know how to add allow apps on the already crowded profile page. You can see that when they release their app platform to public sometime later this month. They had a user interface re-design just a couple of months back and hence they surely won’t have a re-design anytime soon. Indians like simplicity (simplicity as in Google’s design). So take the hint.

3.) Page Loads: The internet connection which an average person uses in India is very slow compared to other well-off countries. So heavy sites like Facebook and MySpace take more timme to load. Orkut takes less time to load now. But I say again, there’s a nice 99.99% chance that they will screwup their page loads too when their app platform launches. I checked that by running an app that prints “Hello World”. And it took about 3 seconds to render just that for the first time with no-cache enabled in the app. I could separate say the render time for the app because the app is rendered via javascript after the other parts of the page load (And I know this because I am a involved with the OpenSocial community that helps in implementing the opensocial app platform that Orkut implements). Orkut might be a Google spun site, but even a million web-servers will do no good if the internet connection of the end-user is slow. Thats another hint if you own/soon-to-run a socionet.

4.) Features: Just a couple of years back, the basic idea that a social networking site allows you connect to your friends took the world away by storm, but today it takes more than common features to stay in competition. Just having a photo album, video gallery and profile page will not do today. Its time that you start offering more innovative features. But how are you going to do it if you don’t have any ideas? The best solution is to setup an app platform. Join the OpenSocial alliance and take advantage of its community code. This will enable a feature where other developers can develop apps for your site (just like the Facebook Platform). Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo, Flixter and others use this platform. And OpenSocial apps can run on any site that supports OpenSocial (unless the app uses some site-specific features). So an app that runs on a site that supports OpenSocial will run on any other site that supports OpenSocial. This gives you an advantage as there are already apps that you can add to your app directory.

This post covers only broad topics. The rest like privacy, content, etc will be covered in my later posts. If you are interested to know more about this. Just shoot a comment below and I’ll try to cover it in my next posts. Till then cya!

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