Orkut from Google is the leader in the Indian social networking space with 7.2 Million unique visitors in June and Facebook attracted 785,000 unique visitors according to comScore.
Web18, has also thrown its hat in the social networking space by unveiling Campus18 to compete with Reliance ADAG’s BigAdda. Web18 is a subsidiary of Television Eighteen. It really makes sense for Web18 to venture into this space to encash on its high Advertising inventory. However, the problem with Web18 portals is they are horribly planned and designed with terrible user experience.
MingleBox, a social networking site that was in controversy for being funded by MingleBox CEO’s [Kavita Iyer] husband [Mr. Sandeep Singhal] at Sequoia Capital has got some relief from Sequoia’s MD Mr. Chadha, who said
We have been very active and early investors in internet in India, we are investors in Shaadi.com, which has Fropper.com as one of its sites. We are also investors in mingle box, we are also investors in travelguru, guruji.com. So, we have been very active investors across that sector. We do not back competitors, so we look at these properties even that they may appear from the outside to be competitive – they have very different focuses, very different user bases and we are seeing a lot of growth in that sector.
Almost all the Indian social networking startups are operating on heard mentality and none have any innovative practices so far. If one starts campus recruiting all of them jump into the same bandwagon and none of them have ever thought of localization. Orkut is the only one that is growing organically but has too much spam on its communities.
