One of the surprising developments at Proto was the announcement by Rediff (which incidentally was the platinum sponsor for the event) of its developer platform by opening up its APIs. The platform will allow developers to create an applications economy on Rediff on the lines of Facebook & Open Social. The move is laudable – it speaks of Rediff’s confidence in its own engineering prowess, though it can be argued that Rediff hardly has the social graph that is necessary for making this successful. RediffMail is likely to have the largest user base, but other services – iShare, Connexions, Rediffblogs etc have a fragmented usage pattern, something that is not best suited for social graph platforms. Below is a snap from the presentation that Rediff ‘s platform head gave at Proto.
To push the platform, the company has also announced an incentive program for application developers. Interested people can submit their ideas to the company and the best 10 entries stand to get a grant of 250K for building the app.
This move is an indication that the Indian homegrown portals are not going to allow the global biggies to eat the cake out of their hands. While they may not have the technical depth, that a Google or Facebook has, they are willing to take the battle to the middle in protecting their home turf.
So who’s next in line… Indiatimes? Sify? any takers ….
Update: Manu from TechSutra notes that Rediff has ripped their platform off Facebook completely. This is what he says- “………… Rediff has completely ripped off facebook devloper platform from naming of API to documentation. FBML becomes RBML, FQL becomes RQL. You can compare the documentation of FQL & RQL below.
Forget innovation, rediff can’t be even bothered to write their own documentation. Right now, there are no appplications which rediff has showcased. All they have is the ripped off documentation and a “get in touch” form which asks you for your application ideas. The form says “Terms and conditions” apply but no where can I find the terms and conditions. This has to be the most ridiculous and shameless platform launch ever!…..”
Read his post here.
What do you say- is it bouquets or brickbats for Rediff?
It is a shame that it is complete rip off of facebook right down to documentation. I have written a little more about it at
http://techsutra.blogspot.com/2008/07/rediff-rips-off-facebook.html
Manu,
I am appending your post to mine… thanks for the tip…
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Facebook’s platform infrastructure code is open with a CPAL license –
http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen/
But renaming everything to suit Rediff, using the same documentation etc. may be a violation…
Damn.. I had forgotten that facebook open sourced their platform. If rediff is using that, which is very likely coming to think of it would rebranding [ripping off] be a license violation ?
Looking at the license it required 1. attribution and 2. distribution of any modifications under the same license.
Manu,
It is all right. From what I hear, it was a rushed off release they had to do with Proto launch. And their objective has been to stay close to facebook and opensocial development frameworks so I think it is all right. Even better for developers that the learning curve may be easy and they can get to productive work quite fast.
cheers
nilesh
It would have been “all right” if they gave attribution to facebook. Ripping off even documentation without attribution is definitely not “all right”. You say it was a rushed release. But what have they released ?????. There is not a single application and the API is also not available right now. An announcement doesn’t count as a release. And no matter however rushed it was attribution is something that takes hardly any time.
And secondly you can’t stay close to both opensocial and facebook development platforms. One is primarily a server side platform [facebook] and the other is client side implemented in javascript. Though both are converging towards having both server side and client side capabilities, right now they are vastly different.
And if they wanted to be close to opensocial, they could have done that legally and openly. Here is the list of partners implementing opensocial. http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/partners.html
And how is the developers life going to be easy if rediff if not forthcoming about the similarities between its platform and facebook’s ?. For a developer who has no experience with facebook’s platform rediff’s platform will look like yet another platform. So I think this has got to do with making rediff’s life easier by taking shortcuts and them trying to score some bragging points with having a deveoper platform.
I agree with comment above that it is a blatant and very poor rip off. Please, we dont have to support rediff just because it happens to be an indian company and just an announcement doesn’t amount to any innovation.
Couldn’t agree more with Manu.
“This move is an indication that the Indian homegrown portals are not going to allow the global biggies to eat the cake out of their hands.”
Google already ate the ‘social’ cake using Orkut. Rediff is just trying to get the leftovers. IMHO, Rediff is analogous to copycat. Yahoo mail -> rediff mail, yahoo messenger -> rediff bol, yahoo homepage -> rediff homepage and so on.
Quoted–India headquartered and Nasdaq listed, Rediff.com India Limited (NASDAQ:REDF) grew its unique users in June 2008, as measured by ComScore Media Metrix, by approximately 13% over the corresponding figure for March 2008. As per Comscore data, in this 3-month period Rediff grew at a rate approximately double that of the average growth rates in the Indian internet market and ahead of the growth rate of international portals like Google and Yahoo! in India.
Source: http://www.smartbrief.com/news/IAB/companyData.jsp?companyId=11168
Highly descriptive post, I loved that a lot. Willl there be a part 2?