Web 2.0 catches on in India

But a logical progression of technology is being viewed with a lot of skepticism in the country.

It's being touted as the new or second-generation Web. Made famous as Web 2.0 by O'Reilly, Web 2.0-enabled sites like Myspace.com, Facebook, Friendster, Digg and Flickr worldwide have managed to get very high valuations "� $15bn in the case of Myspace and $2bn in the case of Facebook. YouTube, in fact, has been taken over by Google for $1.6 billion. Moreover, they boast of millions of users "� over 100 million Myspace users while others with 10 million or so.

It's little wonder, then, that Indian companies too have jumped on the bandwagon. They include Bixee, Pixrat, Zoho and Glogblog, Pixrat, is a social bookmarking service for photos; Bixee is a Web Crawler for jobs; and Glogblog is an Indian online local community site - a desi version of Craigslist if one must compare. Zoho.com from Advent.Net, another Web 2.0 candidate, has a bunch of applications from calendar to spreadsheets. MapmyIndia (from CE Infosystems) has released a beta version of a GoogleMap type digitised mapping product. It works on both the web and on the mobile. The list, of course, is not exhaustive.

Among the bigger players, Yahoo! Search recently announced the release of My Web 2.0 in India. "Web 1.0 was about paid content. Now with Web 2.0, you can get users to give it for free and monetise it with ads," reasons George Zachariah, MD, Yahoo India. Even MSN India is toeing the line. "The Web is moving to 'My Web'. Microsoft believes that the PC computing experience increasingly includes an online view," says Jaspreet Bindra, Country Head, MSN and Windows Live India.

Web 2.0 loosely includes weblogs, wikis, linklogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other forms of many-to-many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, web services and Ajax (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is a web development technique to create interactive web applications). If Double Click, Akamai, mp3.com, content management systems and page views are a few examples associated with Web 1.0, Google AdSense, BitTorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, blogging, cost per click and web services would comprise Web 2.0.

The key is user-created content. For instance, this is at the center of YouTube's strategy which generates about 100 million page views a day (more than the NBC network). Myspace, for instance, adds nearly 3 lakh users a day - more than what MTV adds in a month.

"You have to look at the Web from a triple-play perspective. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content," says Neeraj Roy, CEO, Hungama.com. Concurs Roy Gilbert, Director (Online Sales & Operations), Google (India): "Traditional modes of consumption are changing. Consumers are dispersed and they can shift loyalties. If Web 1.0 was about chat, email, etc., Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, virtual communities and social networking (example, Orkut)."

However, critics of this concept are not enthused with the Web 2.0 idea. "Will this imported concept work in India? asks Avinash Bajaj, founding MD of Matrix Partners Investment Fund. "I've met nearly 20 social networking start-ups who are trying to do a youtube.com in India, in the last couple of months," he explains. He reasons his skepticism stems from the fact that Internet users in India spend a fraction of the time compared to the US counterparts where the Web 2.0 models are successful. Besides, he adds, "the Indian psyche is different. Hence there's no viral effect and these sites are difficult to monetise in India".

Janakiraman Murugavel, CEO & Founder, Bharatmatrimony, concurs: "We too have added Ajax and are making our search dynamic. However, there's no such thing as Web 2.0. Whatever the concept, only real business models will work."