Burrp, the reviews & lifestyle website is launching a revamped homepage. Deap Ubhi (who heads burrp) has sent me screenshots of their yet to be released design, which looks a definite improvement- it seems slicker and more responsive. Burrp is slowly but surely gaining traction. They started off with the Mumbai edition and have since launched Bangalore & Kolkata; Delhi is planned next. They have 5000 registered users and serving about 1.5 lac page views per day. 85% of their users are above 25 yrs; 40% are women and the three main user segments are- college students, working professionals and stay at home woman. Future plans include splitting the website into two sections- ‘Burrp! Local’ & ‘Burrp! Life’. Burrp local will be city specific and will expand into newer categories of local content (e.g. local events), while Burrp Life will focus on the lifestyle segment. The online magazine Blah, that they launched some time back is probably a build-up to this strategy. Also on the anvil are plans for introducing SMS-based and IVR-based search.

You can listen to this podcast interview with Deap on Podtech’s India channel, where he talks about their future plans to approach VC firms for funding.

Something that I REALLY LIKE about Burrp (and its team) is their accent on organic growth and reluctance to overload their webapp with features. Their launch (4-5 months ago) was low key but they have consistently gained in traffic. They are adding features and sections incrementally, and I think it is based on insight & feedback from users. I think there is a learning here for all of us- unless you are a Google or a Yahoo, there is no substitute to organic and sensible growth. Many of the sites that I have reviewed on Webyantra in the past (or other ones that I did not write about), fail miserably on that count. People who create webapps should desist from bombarding their users with senseless add–on features. New features have to dovetail into the core product and it should be driven by insights gained from actual user behavioral patterns. There has to be a demonstrated ROI behind every new feature, for it will make the system bulkier than without, more difficult to maintain and more confusing than before, leading to dropouts amongst the initial adopters. Case in point- many social networking sites have a classifieds section at the time of launching- I think that’s sheer senselessness.

I’ve had a very disappointing experience with Rediff. For a company, which is India’s internet pioneer and also our biggest portal, should be doing better than this. It seems that there is a horrible bug in a very critical part of their website that has gone unattended for a long time, or something worse than that – their shopping cart does not work in Firefox. Let me explain. (Incidentally, I quite like Rediff and it has been the default homepage in my browser, uninterrupted for three years now).

I bought the Webyantra.net domain on the web hosting section on Rediff almost an year back (Apr06). I clearly remember that at the time of making the online payment for the domain on Rediff Business Solutions, the system showed a bug (it showed a static white screen just after clicking the ‘make payment’ button in the shopping cart). I had to try it out a few times, with the same result, and eventually succeeded after 5-6 frustrating attempts. While the experience was bad, I attributed it to some random bug and forgot about it. Yesterday I had to renew the domain name as it was nearing expiry. I again logged into my Rediff web hosting account to make the payment using the shopping cart. And I got EXACTLY THE SAME BUG (not once, but twice). Quite bewildered and not sure what to do, I decided to try it out in IE (My default browser is Firefox). The transaction sailed through perfectly. Though last year, I had never tried out Internet Explorer (it had not occurred to me then). Thus it seems likely that the shopping cart does not work in Firefox (a bug that is unsolved for one long year is highly improbable). I checked on the site’s FAQ but could not find anything. Somebody please correct me if I am wrong.

I have personally encountered Firefox incompatibility problems on a couple of other popular Indian sites earlier – PVR Cinemas and AirDeccan. One might argue that the IE/Firefox browser wars are for the open source nerds & alpha geeks and don’t really matter to Indian consumer internet sites, for Firefox’s penetration figures in India are surely abysmal. Well, I appreciate that argument and think it probably makes sense for PVR Cinemas & AirDeccan to ignore Firefox. But not for Rediff.

The Hall of Shame: On googling further on this issue, I ran into the Hall of Shame, which is a compilation of Indian websites (on the Delhi Linux User group website) that don’t work on Linux or Firefox (work only on IE). Rediff’s name is not there but a few prominent establishments or companies certainly find mention in this infamous list.

My question to Webyantra’s readers- Have other people encountered similar problems with Rediff or do you know of other prominent Indian sites that don’t work on FF? Or is this a non-issue?