UVTimes

I have been working on a few social networking based websites for US. They are all new creative and bright concepts that provide users social networking with … (something). I was wondering why dont i see so many social networking concepts working for India. Yes, there has been orkut and now facebook is gaining. But there have been a lot of small communities with bright ideas, which are not ‘popular‘. So, I have tried to do an analysis of why Social Networking based concepts would not work for India.

Here is top 4 reasons, in brief, why social networking wesites have picked up (whatever little they have) in India:

1. Timepass: Its up mostly with teens and youngsters, the reason they do it is so that they get more time together playing pranks, discussing new-chic-in-the-town and just checking out whats new with friends.

2. Emotional: The urge to Reunite with old buddies, relive those moments is the one most popular cause for people like and many others to join a social networking site.

3. Professional profits: Some smart people have also tried to see if they can adverise, by sending mass scraps, mails to specific communities so that they can sell. Niether do people believe such spams nor they care about it much. And even if they do, it doesn’t interest them after having forwarded it to hundred people and receiving the same back from them.

4. Its Cool: It is of course cool to flaunt your best pics, have hundreds in your friends list and thousands of senseless blabbers (posts/scribble/scrap) to your account.

None other than orkut comes even close to bring any virtualization to Indian societies. So I was just trying to see why have Indians been slow at picking up on virtualization of society? Also, how much sense does it make to start a new SN based portal and profit from it. And I realized that here are a few factors that discourage people from virtualizing their avatars.

1. First and the most prominent one is, where-is-the-need? India has a closely knit real society and there is so much social interaction in reality that people seldom feel the need to get virtual. So, you have big joint families, closely officiating nieghbourhood friends, extra enthusiastic colleagues, and a long list of friends from college, school(s) and so on. Man is a social animal and he almost always wants to be surrounded by people. And in India, you might find difficult to get away from people. It only happens in Metros where people are unaware of their nieghbors for years and it is mostly because their busy/unearthly work schedules, and so you will see virtualization is quite prominent. Unlike west, a large chunk of people are still arranged-married and they don’t have this dire need to find a buddy or stay loner problem. They have it hardcoded at back of their mind that their parents(and parent’s real social network) will someday find an appropriate bride/groom for them. So again no impending need to socialize online.

2. Specially if you are a typical Indian (talkative and gossip monger) there is hardly time to do your work and pursue your hobbies, where-is-the-time for virtual societies.

3. Less exposure to IT: We may be an IT superpower but we are also a population supergiant. So effectively the fraction of people exposed to IT is less. Its true that the the number is increasing, but how many are effectively getting close to social networking isnt very drastic.

4. ‘Facebook Fatigue’: This article discusses in detail what happens to all social networking fans after some time. I could find out why I use orkut so infrequently?

5. Big players are already in to play (BigAdda) so if someone is thinking about starting anything linked to Social Networking for India, he should either change his mind right now, or give it a long thought before doing it. 

If you have anything to say about this please do hit the comment button.