Zillr is what I would describe as JAISNS (just another Indian social networking site) with a couple of differences: a) it is targeted specifically at the Indian diaspora in UAE (United Arab Emirates) and b) its rising popularity there invited a ban from the UAE authorities without assigning a reason. Other than that, Zillr looks like an Orkut clone i.e. old UI of Orkut (screenshot below).

The site was launched eight months back and currently has 52K members (growing 400 a day). Almost all its users are Indians (either in the UAE or in India). Ravish Kumar (the guy behind zillr) informs me that Zillr managed to break into the top 500 sites in UAE in just 45 days. Then their site got blocked for an unspecified reason, which saw their traffic reduce from 10 mn monthly pageviews to 4 mn (currently it is 6 mn). Ravish emailed Etisalat (Emirates Telecommunications Corporation) inquiring about the reason for the ban, but never got an official reply. Apparently, this happens often to other sites as well. To fight the ban, Ravish created this online petition and tried to use that to mobilise support against the blockage.

Something else worth pointing out is that Zillr averages 30-35 pages per visit (as per stats shared with me). Now this number is quite significant. I created an account on Zillr just to explore this and the website’s page loading was fast & zippy. Just shows that site speed is a critical driver to site stickiness.

Check out this awesome graphic that depicts the ensuing polarisation in the global internet sweepstakes with the emergence of three distinct camps. The first camp is led by FaceBook (the Rebel Alliance) which sparked off this cold war in the first place; the next is the Google Open Social camp (referred to as the Empire) and the third is the MySpace camp (the Clone Army) trying hard to be more than just an also ran. The three camps have their own symbiotic inter-relationships with the widget companies (slide, rockyou, flixster, youtube, friendster, ilike etc) as the diagram depicts. Waiting on the fringes are companies like LinkedIn which have announced their own future platforms/API…

This is a VERY fascinating graphic indeed and as they say “…a picture can say a thousand words…”. It has been put together by David McClure, one of Silicon Valley’s leading technology commentators (and also on the slideshare advisory board now!)…he uploaded the graphic to slideshare where I found it!

Take a look…