Indian social bookmarking sites take off & it’s a rush out there already..

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I have been approached by four social bookmarking sites for reviews; however instead of writing individual reviews, it makes sense to do a sweeping scan of this entire space, hence this round up post.

If the essence of Web2.0 is social sharing, websites like Digg, Del.icio.us etc are at the forefront of this new web paradigm. They are popular because they function as antidotes to the internet’s biggest problem – its unbridled vastness and ever growing nature. These sites serve two specific purposes- (a) aggregating the internet content through shared bookmarking and (b) filtering that content, to isolate the most popular amongst the shared bookmarks.

A bunch of Indian social bookmarking sites have sprung up and I think, they are slowly gaining traction. I assert this because, many of the reviews that I write on Webyantra get bookmarked on these sites and contribute fairly significant traffic to this blog. Almost all the sites that are being reviewed here (except IndiaMarks) have adopted Digg’s basic design as a benchmark, with traces of innovative features peppered here and there. In my opinion, there are three distinct factors, that are crucial to the success of a social bookmarking site.

1) the content on the site,
2) how the site’s design aids discoverability and findability of that content,
3) and the site’s aesthetics, usability, look/feel etc.

This review will attempt to explore how the sites fare along these dimensions.

newscola.jpgNewsCola– This site has been launched by RHR Networks, the Bangalore based startup that runs Bixee, Pixrat, Glogblog etc. The fact that Pixrat happens to be the first Indian website to be TechCrunched, inherently raises my expectations from the RHR team. I had a detailed chat with RHR’s Himanshu Nautiyal, when NewsCola was launched; he shared his perspective of the Indian social bookmarking space and how they would like to differentiate by being a ‘news’ bookmarking site. I love the name NewsCola- it is very catchy and seems very apt for a news site. Though, I personally feel that NewsCola (by focusing on news, instead of interesting stories) is taking a fairly radical approach to social bookmarking, for the Digg style voting interface is not best suited for news. Newscola’s interface seems to be inspired by Reddit. The site’s design makes for easy discoverability and it has a clean, Web2.0ish look. The site was launched just 2-3 weeks back and so its still early to assess how it is performing.

humdigg.jpgHumDigg: This site has been around for 3-4 months and seems to be getting sparing traffic currently. I like the site’s design in terms of its discoverability but the content on the site doesn’t seem India focused. Which inherently undermines the basic reason behind the site’s existence. Why should I go to HumDigg to read non India specific content? Should I rather not go to Digg for that? Something that reflects poorly on the site’s creators is the fact that this site is anonymous. I looked around on the site but found no references to the identity of the site’s promoters, except a one line pointer to something (maybe a company) called M9 (reminds me of MI6).

indianpad.jpgIndianPad: This site has been around for more than six months and probably gets the most traffic at this stage. While the website’s name is fairly indistinctive, it’s design is excellent from the standpoint of discoverability. It also has some pretty innovative features like this cool mashup of user lists with GoogleMaps, the ability to upload audio files, ability for users to put their Google ads on IndianPad and earn ad revenues, innovative tag/story clouds etc. So far so good. What I DON’T like about IndianPad is the fact that it has a very active adult/porn section (something that’s totally unnecessary for a site of this nature). Take a look at the livecast section; one distinctly gets the impression that IndianPad is cunningly using adult content to drive traffic to its site. Now, this is what I would call ‘hitting below the belt’. And quite conveniently enough, the site is anonymous- there is not a shred of mention anywhere about its creators. Overall I think, the creators of IndianPad, by including adult/porn content on the site, are doing THEMSELVES a great disfavour and tarnishing the site’s image.

indiamarks.jpgIndiaMarks: This site is from Better Labs (a Pune/Silicon Valley startup) and is the only site, that has not adopted the popular Digg style voting mechanism. I like its basic look/feel, but I think it needs to improve from the standpoint of discoverability. The content on the site, while being quite technology centric, doesn’t seem India specific and I see that causing a diffusion in its focus. I think the site’s approach is a refreshing departure from the Digg fixation; I’ll be interested to know what others think of this.

indiagram.jpgIndiaGram: This site is run by these three guys. It largely has India specific content and probably gets a fair degree of traffic as well. There is some distinctiveness about its visual look/feel but the site needs to improve from a discoverability standpoint. I think the site should try to add some innovative features, to give it a greater ‘grip’ over its users.

putvote.jpgPutVote: This is a recent entrant to this space. I searched on the site but couldn’t find any reference to its creators. Whoever it is, he/she sure does have a cool sense of humour. You can’t miss the kinky language on its ‘about’ page. I find this site quite promising. It has a distinctive look & feel, it scores well on the discoverability front and the content seems India specific (in fact, specific to South India, rather Chennai in particular). Watch out for this site in future!

forums.jpgForums Of India: This site is from a Chicago based company called Oviya Technologies, which is run by an Indian software professional. It has separate sections for articles, videos & forums which gets split at the homepage itself. I am not sure if this is a good idea from a user’s perspective. The site’s content is largely India centric but it doesn’t seem to be getting much traffic currently.

Updated on 23/8/06

bytes.jpgIndianBytes– This site is possibly the latest entrant to this space. I browsed the site briefly but found no references anywhere to its creators. It must be some NRI living in Colorado, USA, because (as per this ‘Terms of Use’) all browsing litigations on the website are subject to the laws of that place!!! The name IndianByte sounds quite indistinctive and very similar to IndianPad, IndiaMarks, IndiaGram. (While on this, can I request all future Indian social bookmarking sites NOT TO USE INDIA OR INDIAN IN THEIR NAME.) As of now, IndianBytes seems to have implemented a pretty basic Digg kind of design. The user interface has a pleasing colour scheme. The site doesn’t have much content currently and I think they need to address the discoverability factor.

I tried to do a split of how many of the eight sites reviewed in this post, are India based and how many are from NRIs. Here’s what my best guess is (and it might be wrong!)-

NewsCola – the RHR guys are Bangalore based
HumDigg – anonymous site, but I think (don’t ask me why) it must be an NRI
IndianPad – anonymous site, but again my hunch is that, it must be an NRI
IndiaMarks – BetterLabs has offices in Pune/Silicon valley
IndiaGram – not sure but looks predominantly NRI to me
PutVote – seems to be a (resident Indian+NRI) team
ForumsOfIndia – NRI based in Chicago
IndianBytes – seems like an NRI in Colorado,USA

And if the above is true, it shows that Indian Web2.0 sites are currently preoccupied with what economists describe as ‘concept arbitrage’. How I wish, they could shake off some of their Silicon Valley fixation and create original & innovative products .

—————————————————————————

(Just to understand how these sites are actually faring in terms of traffic, I plan to create accounts on each of them and bookmark this post. I’ll post the results of this ‘test’ as an update to this post, a week or two later.)

184 thoughts on “Indian social bookmarking sites take off & it’s a rush out there already..”

  1. Pingback: Indian social bookmarking sites take off & it’s a rush out there already.. : Tech Tips

  3. phani

    Hi….

    the article is pretty good….

    I bookmark on to indianpad,indiagram and humdigg

    I would like to comment a few things

    1. Indian pad is definitely the best,though most of the articles are masala based.
    2.Hum digg is abt ‘hum’ the inidans digging the stories… not necessarily mean that its only abt the indian stories…. its about all the stories that are of relevance to indians…. (or so the bookmarker thinks..)

    On the whole i like the simple interface of humdigg and it has lot of scope for improvement and compared to other bookmarking sites… it has very few porn,masala links and stories are comparitively better commented up on….

    indiamarks and forums of india are perhaps the worst of the list

    News cola and put vote yet to prove their mettle…. But so far the stories seem to repeat in most of the bookmarking sites….

    another struggling new site is
    http://indianbytes.com/ to sum it up……..

    Reply ↓
  4. amit Post author

    “Just to understand how these sites are actually faring in terms of traffic, I plan to create accounts on each of them and bookmark this post. I’ll post the results of this ‘test’ as an update to this post, a week or two later.”

    Well it seems that I will be spared the trouble of bookmarking this post myself on the sites. Within two hours of this post being published, it has been bookmarked on putvote, indianpad, humdigg, indiagram (as per comments/emails received by me)

    amit

    Reply ↓

  6. Pingback: DesiPundit » Archives » Desi digg clones review

  7. Midhun

    There’s another with a slightly more innovative name by some ex-IIMA guys called rambhai.com
    It’s look and feel needs work, but the name, concept and content look cool to begin with.

    Reply ↓
  8. Himanshu Nautiyal

    Great roundup of the space, Amit.

    We at Newscola are working on personalized news in addition to the basic bookmarking. I think that will be the killer. The site is also moving slightly towards “interesting content” rather than just “news”. Your guess about what might get more success seems to be correct.

    The next few months are going to be exciting. May the best bookmarker win 😉

    Reply ↓

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  10. kaps

    Agree with your point about Indian Pad. I have subscribed to a feed which doesn’t contain adult content, but still end up getting adult content on my feed. One of the reason is that the people who upload the content end up uploading adult content without mentioning the fact that it is adult content. The moderators need to manually filter out the stuff.

    Reply ↓
  11. a champion bookmarker

    IndianPad is basically a porn site masquerading as a social bookmarking site.

    Want proof of this- ok ; look up the most popular stories section, also look up what people are searching for on the site, also look at the livecast – you will know what I mean ..

    Reply ↓
  12. beachbong

    I am one of the most active users at IndianPad and have never visited the Adult Section. Does it bother me that the site has adult related content? Yes, but I would HATE it if the editors there start meddling with our stories.

    I know Indians love censorship but I am glad that IndianPad bucks the trend and allows people to post any content they want.

    Here are some stats for you from this page – Out of 10,000 stories only 707 are adult!

    Reply ↓
  13. ram

    Nice review of the sites. It is interesting to note that newscola, forumsofindia and indianbytes are all based on the same open source software, pligg, but none of the sites mention it.. putvote is hosted on crispynews.com with which one can setup a similar site in a couple of hours..

    Inspite of all these sites coming up, most of them don’t appeal to me as all of them seem to concentrate on ‘news’ items which are useful only if you read them on the day the ‘news’ happened. Looking at earlier links on these sites is pretty much useless. One exception is forumsofindia which seems to have more of ‘articles’ than ‘news’. But, as you mentioned it doesn’t seem to have as much traffic as the others.

    Reply ↓
  14. jiyocricket

    Im sure If you can compare and contrast with US centric sites like digg, reddit etc you can infer the following.

    1. Indians dont like to comment. % of comments is insignificant as compared to the digg
    2. Indians dont like to vote. again same % as above
    3. Indian audience is still immature. The demographic of the western world as opposed to India is different in terms of usage of social bookmarking sites in terms of age. PC penetration (affluence) is a recent phenonmenon (8+ years) as opposed to the western world who have lived thru ibm pc’s, apple mac’s etc.

    On a sidenote IndianPad should drop the porn section lest Google Safesearch classifies the site as peddling porn.

    Neverthless IndianPad has the critical mass of readers, and posters, the most important thing in a social networking site thereby making all other sites to be a subset of IndianPad in terms of content, posters and readers.

    so for what its worth I vote IndianPad number 1.

    Reply ↓
  15. indianpad

    Amit, thanks for the review. Indianbytes.com is also a good site that wasn’t mentioned.

    I am copying the response that I gave to this story at indianpad.

    —

    Amit does have a point when he says that the Adult section on the site is quite active. However, we disagree with comments that label us as ‘porn peddlers’.

    We have had discussions internally on whether we should limit adult content but we have unanimously voted down any ‘censorship’ on multiple occasions. All adult content is separated into its own categories so that our filters can hide it from regular view. We have also gone to great lengths to filter other adult content from users who have not chosen to view it.

    We are also working on filters so that adult content automatically recognized and flagged into the adult category but this will require fine tuning over the near future.

    As mentioned, some pages cannot be filtered :
    Who’s Online – We will be misreporting our stats if we filtered all adult posts here.
    Live Search – There is no way to decide by looking at the words whether the context is adult or not.
    Stats – We will be misreporting our stats if we filtered all adult posts here.

    We are always open to suggestions on how we can improve and make the site easier for users. But, censorship is a slippery slope and our users can rest assured that we will ‘NOT’ censor content.

    Kindly note that even Google will serve you porn if you search for it!

    —

    As always, the content is yours and the bugs are ours 😉

    Reply ↓
  16. Vaibhav Domkundwar - Better Labs

    Amit:

    Thanks for the coverage of indiamarks, and this is definitely a good recap. indiamarks is currently under going a fairly big change and I will keep you posted when we launched the 1.0 update. I believe we will continue to focus on the bookmarking aspect to surface valuable content that Indians find useful.

    In the meantime, we are evolving indiahappening towards more of a “users reporting interesting stuff” angle and we should have that ready to go by next month.

    Like Himanshu says above, the service that will connect with the users will prevail.

    Reply ↓
  20. Kingsley Joseph

    Hi Amit, tried to email you couple days ago, but since I haven’t received a response, I’ll assume it fell prey to a spam filter.

    First, thanks for mentioning us, inspite of us still being in the barely-works stage (way before alpha :). PutVote is run by me and my blogger friend Chandru aka Ravages. We don’t have a very formal setup. Our technology is off-the-shelf and we couldn’t care less. We are what I call casualpreneurs – but just because we do this part-time doesn’t mean we are any less serious.

    We want to build a fun community of blog enthusiasts, both readers and bloggers. We think the way to do that is by involving bloggers and that is where our focus is/ will be. We don’t have a revenue model. The ads on our site belong to our service provider, which keeps our expenses down to just time.

    On the issue of porn/censorship, I’m of the opinion that you can’t have both unless you have a Google-quality filter to keep it out-of-view for everyone who doesn’t want to see it. It’s easier for a fledgling outfit like us to just say no to it than spend time trying to keep it out of everyone’s way.

    We’re going to spend the time we save by not doing that, in marketing and getting the word out. We have a lot more planned on that front, and I’ll keep you posted.

    Reply ↓
  21. Naveen

    Indianpad is in someways a meshup of digg and youtube. And the similarity to youtube is courageous and commendable. Thanks for standing up for free speech. Remaining anonymous will also help probably…

    Shortsighted fear and scorn of immorality is what allows economically stupid things such as the drug war to continue…

    Reply ↓
  22. Vikram

    Thats a good review Amit!

    Glad that you mentioned about Indianpad. We indians are good at innovating on a borrowed concept. the same goes true for indianpad. The recipe is: google maps, userlist, simple and clean design etc etc AND some porn under the garb of user generated content. (Wonder who these users are, with suggestive and funny names). Its loud and clear- ‘Porn sells’ (and brings in traffic to the site)’. When this is pointed out – people scream foul – censorship, curb on expression of speech, indian audience are immature blah blah blah.

    Anyhow, its good to see Indianpad cleaning up their act. they began with a bold tab of ‘Adult’, changed that to 18+, now they have further moved the 18+ tab down to a separate box, presumably for the ‘only interested’ can subscribe. They need to also do something about the ‘songs with abuse’. To my mind some are bawdy songs and they need to be moved. However, I leave it to the judgement of indianpad, whether they want a first time user to be put off by the explicits staring in the face or they want to shift this elsehwere. Go to the site look at the music section on the right side and see what I mean….

    Reply ↓

  25. Pingback: iface thoughts » Blog Archive » Indian Social Bookmarking Sites

  26. Dolan Champa Guharay

    After reading all the comments, I could not stop myself and hence, would like to inform you all that http://www.humsubka.com , another social networking site is in pipeline to dominate the rest. Equipped with new features, like – Live Chat, Online Music, Free Classifieds and Online Data Storage upto 1Gb makes this site unique among others.

    No doubt, http://www.humsubka.com is modelled on MySpace, but focusing Indian community is something which makes it popular among NRIs who have been waiting for a website carrying all the above mentioned features on a common platform.

    Reply ↓
  32. DP

    hooeey (www.hooeey.com) is more in its own space. While it is also a social bookmarking site, it stands out from the crowd in features like a downloadable toolbar that allows real time record on and off features , as well as an analytics page that lets you study your browsing history patterns ( especially useful for researchers and people who surf as part of their work).

    Hooeeys good….. check it out.
    DP

    Reply ↓
  33. Bapi

    What exactly is the revenue model of these social bookmarking sites? Can anyone coment if they are able to make money or when they expect to breakeven?
    cheers!

    Reply ↓
  35. Spatibanda

    Check out this newest entrant in this arena.

    DolBajao.com is a good ‘India Centric’ Social Bookmarking site Catering to Indians worlwide. It gives the “real power to the people” in deciding what should be published with a mission to “Spread clean and fun Indian Content on the internet!”.

    DolBajao.com is a web service that allows anyone to submit a link to a news article, a YouTube Video, a great Deal, a bollywood story that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page. Users can submit and play embedded videos, images etc.

    Reply ↓

  36. Pingback: Startup Dunia - Indian startups and Entrepreneurship » Blog Archive » Criki - Digg clone for Cricket fans

  37. Mozomo

    Social Bookmarking and Agreegating is outdated Hyper Agreegating seems to be the future….

    Has anyone chked India’s first Web 2.0 Hyper Aggregated Portal – Indy Chai the Beta version?!

    I think its Awesome + Simple!

    http://www.IndyChai.com

    Reply ↓

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  40. babu

    I was looking for an Indian site that can combine news, movies, cricket and also social networking aspects such as forums, blogs, private messages etc. I stumbled upon http://www.hangoutwith.com and found to be great! Hangoutwith.com is a good social networking site especially for Indians and it is much cleaner than other sites such as orkut, tagged etc. I agree that it is still in Beta and need to get fine tuned. But I am sure that people at hangoutwith.com are doing their best to get there!

    Give it a Spin!

    Reply ↓

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