The Social Networking romp in India!

Orkut has been going great guns in India with an ever-increasing membership base from this country. Despite it's failure in several other countries, it has been the Social Network (SN) with the greatest activity in the Indian Online Market. Hi5 tried to enter the picture and eat some "Orkut" share but that never really happened. In the world of Networking, the USP of an SN is not the array of services that it provides but the size of its membership base. A user, actively connected to all his friends through Orkut had no incentive to sign up on an entirely new community with not even a tenth of his friends, even if it claimed to provide better features. A classic case of Metcalfe's Law which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.

Well, Orkut was sitting pretty with its lock-in of users until Gazzag happened. Gazzag realized that the only way they could eat Orkut's share was by replicating Orkut's membership base at breakneck speed. Well, that, 0r at least make the user believe that the replication was actually happening. So they wrote a cute little script which would spam every person's friends list when he added himself to Gazzag. So the user was happy since he could import his friends list from Orkut onto a new community with much better features. And a lot of those who got the spam mail did end up in Gazzag, be it out of choice or as a remedy to the frustrating spam problem.

Now that Orkut's greatest asset, its user base, is on the road to replication, it has suddenly swung into top gear improving the usability of the site. The site which had thus far remained fairly unchanged in terms of usability suddenly swung into action and made scrapping very user friendly. This was followed by its integration with Google Talk to answer Gazzag's messenger integration.I am sure Orkut could have included an in-built messenger but they chose to integrate with Google Talk instead. While this makes things slightly inconvenient while chatting on Orkut, it is a great way to get more people to sign on to Google Talk which isn't all that popular in India.The SN space in the Indian market is definitely in for a lot of dynamism in the near future.Somehow, the Community model in general and the SN model in particular looks like the perfect recipe for success in a country where relationships are valued a lot and where the strength of offline community bonds can actually spur the growth of online ones.

Online vs. Traditional Media: The Difference

Traditionally, the content production industries (read Music Recording, Movie Production) have had a very cordial relationship with the media using the latter as a distribution vehicle. The advent of the Internet changed equations and for the first time Media was actually considered a threat. Radio and Television were welcomed by content producers but the rise of the Internet has actually witnessed a slew of lawsuits and legal battles with the content producers. From its earliest days, the online media system was organized around the sharing of information between its users, an aspect where it differed significantly from its traditional counterparts. Things turned sour as consumers moved from sharing self-generated content to sharing a copyrighted content. The content industries survive on copyrights and a system violating the same in broad daylight with a different business model everyday is bound to hurt it bad.

The other aspect where Online Media brought in a new mindset was the way content was transmitted. Traditional Media had thrived on the Push model with providers and media houses deciding the content to be aired on radio and television and consumers simply picking from among what was available. With the advent of information sharing over the internet, the line separating the consumer from the provider grew thin and a Pull system came into effect. Consumers would ask for information (forums, chat rooms etc.) and get it within a few minutes. Such was the power of the network.

The content production industries never prepared themselves for such a change. Caught unawares, they could do little but resort to legal battles. The legal battles succeeded for some time till the Dot Com brains came up with new business models finding legal loopholes. With time, they’ve realized that the only way to master the online world is to join it with their own set of business models which try to balance the seeming opposites of Copyright Protection and Information Sharing. Online Music and Video Services are moving towards free access to music and more revenues from advertisements. Advertising is fast eating into Subscription’s share of the revenue pie.

The future has to move towards a pull model of information sharing. The organized industry just needs to figure out how to join the party and be profitable at the same time.