On any given day on Facebook, friends buy each other drinks, poke or spank one another, have food fights, or turn someone into a vampire.
From MySpace to orkut, you can share a level of virtual interaction with your contacts that was unheard of a few years ago. The kidnapping and murder of Mumbai teenager Adnan Patrawala, who was lured by his killers through a social networking site, has sparked off a debate on these sites. But the idea of virtual networking has caught on in India. And over a dozen social networking sites (SNS) are currently vying to draw Net savvy youngsters away from orkut, the wildly popular site operated by Internet major Google Inc. These sites are all shooting for a larger share of clicks in a community of users estimated to be 10 million strong—just over a fifth of that number are active participants, though. The latest to join the fray is Reliance Entertainment’s BigAdda.
SNS entrepreneurs aim to build a critical mass of users in the age group of 18-35, the kind of people advertisers look for. For instance, Fropper.com, in business since 2003, has brands such as Levi’s, Airtel and Garnier advertising on the site. But to reach that stage, sites need to register at least one million users.
By March 2008, 53 million Indians will be using the Internet, according to a study by The Internet and Mobile Association of India. More than 35 million of these will be active users, people whom this young bunch of spunky Internet entrepreneurs are desperately looking to chat up on their sites.
VIVEK PAHWA, 26
CEO, DesiMartini.com
Started: October 2006
Users: 300,000
The one year he spent acquiring a management diploma from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad saw Vivek Pahwa, a mechanical engineer, turn to the Internet. About 10 months ago, he logged on to the social networking space by floating DesiMartini.com.
Second venture: Vivek Pahwa (left) feels the SNS space is now ready for a consolidation
It was a time when the buzz around Web 2.0 applications, which focus on interactions between users on an online site, was quickly gaining ground in India. Fee-based online services, such as marriage portals and job sites, had grown into mature businesses; the next new thing was definitely social networking.
Pahwa feels the SNS space is now ready for a wave of consolidation. “A million users is the minimum base that a social networking site must have to be able to earn revenues,” says Pahwa. DesiMartini, with about 300,000 registered users and about eight million page views a month, is definitely a work-in-progress.
In June this year, Pahwa beefed up his Internet services by launching a second business, SecondShaadi.com, a portal for those looking to remarry. It has a direct fee-based model. Like other social networking sites, DesiMartini must rely on advertisements and value-added services to earn revenues—a challenge all India-based social networking sites face.