Tough time ahead for Indian networking sites

Competition with online international networks hots up in cyberspace .

The online social networking market is getting crowded. With international social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace becoming a part of the daily routine for the 38.5 million Internet users in India, the Indian social networking wannabes will have a tough time ahead.

To name a few, Reliance ADA group's Bigadda.com, Yaari.com founded by Stanford University graduates Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia, MIH India's portal Ibobo.com, People Group's Fropper.com and many others are here for a "friendly" tussle.

The Internet user base is estimated to grow to 100 million by 2007-08, according to Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). It is estimated that 10 per cent of the present Internet audience is active on social networking portals, which is close to 4 million users today.

By all measures, online networking in India has moved beyond scrapping, a term used for posting messages on the social networks, to become a more interactive medium. The users now experiment with over a dozen-odd sites present in the cyberspace before narrowing down to a couple of favourites.

The question that still remains, however, is how many social networks any single user is likely to join and remain active in? Siddhartha Roy, chief operating officer, BigAdda, comments: "The aim of our site is to increase the user stickiness, and hence our obsessive dedication towards user generated content like blogs, music and video." The portal is eyeing 10 million users by 2010.

Roy says BigAdda would soon make a debut in mobile phones and regional languages. "Games and content sharing tie-ups with Zapak.com will materialise in the next few weeks. We are also looking for third party content providers," he adds.

Orkut, a social networking portal bought over by Google, is hugely popular in India. For Orkut, moving to a mobile version and integrating Google applications on its social networking portal seems to be the next logical step.

Vinay Goel, products head, Google India, concurs that Google's ownership of videos through YouTube and its services like Gmail and instant messenger should see an integration with Orkut. He also indicated that a "single sign in" platform, wherein the user could log in with a single user name, can be expected.

Although Goel does not discount the competition from Indian networking sites, he says, "It would be difficult for any single site to gain the user volume that Orkut has."

There are financial reasons fueling the competition too. Globally, advertisers are expected to spend $1.9 billion on online social networks by 2010, up from $280 million in 2006.

Quite expectedly, Sequoia Capital has already invested $2 million in the Indian start-up minglebox.com, a site focusing on the college and student alumni networks.

For smaller players like Yaari.com, gathering a sizeable user base seems to be the immediate priority. The site is gifting iPods to its most popular users in an attempt to grow its network.

Having created a successful online matrimonial portal like Shaadi.com, People Group seems to have immense faith in its online dating and networking site, Fropper.com, that garners 70,000-1,00,000 registrations a month, or so claims the company.

"With a registered user base of 2.5 million people, our site has managed to increase the average time per user on the site from 8-10 minutes per visit to 15-30 minutes per visit," says Navin Mittal, business head, Fropper.com.

Meanwhile, others like the South African media conglomerate Naspers' Indian subsidiary, MIH India, is popularising contextual networking, blogging and photo sharing services on its networking portal, ibibo.com.

Ashish Kashyap, chief executive officer, MIH India, is hopeful that the trend of users migrating from Orkut to other social media sites would accelerate in future.

"The reasons for migration range from privacy concerns, finding like-minded people and friends on other sites to features like blogging, photo sharing, polling and others," he adds.

However, the irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the Internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness could stifle their potential.

How about considering an interoperable social networking platform? Many of the fun-seeking Facebookers may actually be the very same respectful professionals at LinkedIn or techTribe. So, we need a system that connects all social networks "" that a user is a member of "" and shares basic functionalities.