There are so many Indian social networking sites.
Do you think you can be even on 4-5 on them comfortably managing all the profiles of yours on those sites?
I think in the long run only the old ones such as google's Orkut will survive.
The days are over where you could copy a concept and be a great success, especially when the concept is already well-imaged and managed by a big company such as Orkut (google)
These new sites throw a lot money in publicity, attracting new members, and then, recovering the money becomes difficult because every user develops a 'banner blindness', finally when there is no more money, the site goes stale.
Just 2 observations to prove my point:
1. How many of you read the new Google Adsense ads placed near header and footer of this thread as keenly as you read the posts in this thread?
2. When you hear social networking sites, what comes to your mind first Orkut, Ibibo, Bigadda, Gokut, Fropper, YouMint or ZillR or some other site?
And I have a friend who has been sending me repeated invitations to joint this YouMint and this irritated me so terribly that I finally had to set my email filter to junk all emails from his id. youmint says that it will allow a user to send SMS worth Rs. 900, but they will send advertisements to your mobile phone. Moreover, they claim that if they will pay me if I get more users to join their site. Its very much
like that Amway program where you sell toothpastes, soaps, perfumes and get more of your friends to do that too. And the shocking thing is that the person who sent me this invitation to join Youmint is a student if VJTI, Mumbai. Now you don't expect a student from VJTI to stoop so low that he will ask you to join maybe because he gets 2-3 rupees when you join. Thats too dirty and disgusting.
Do you think you will be interested in reading messages which you know are advertisments? When ad publishers will realize this, they will stop using these services and revenues of these websites will take a beat! Moreover, you always have the fear of getting spam in your SMS inbox. Though they say that 'We will not sell/rent your personal information', their privacy policy and terms of use reserves them the right to change rules and allow them to sell your personal information. and this is what many of them would do when they have to recover the money!
