Directory of Indian Next-Gen Sites

Photo
Picsquare, SnapGalaxy,

Business
Doctor-fixit, dimdim, TechMirchi, CarWale, Compare India

Gadgets
Tech2

Travel
ezeego1

Education
tutorvista

Gaming
Zapak, IndiaGames, Jump Games

Directory of Indian Web2.0 Portals

Local Search Engines
Guruji

Local Classifieds
We-Exchange, Indyapage,

Vertical Search
Bixee

Music
sangeetix, dhingana

Social Networking
techTribe, humsubka, apundesi, yo4ya.com, yaari, hooeey

Travel
meratrip.com, TravelOTravel, Ok Tata Bye Bye, merasnap, Make my trip, ClearTrip, Holiday IQ

Social Bookmarks
pixrat

Very Niche
Sanskrit Voice

Reviews
Burrp, Mouthshut

Videos
KonkanTV

Jobs
CampusChai, Jobs4freshers

Web2.0: Two line reviews

My two-line review of Web2.0 kind of sites. Of those web2.0 sites that appear in the first 100 sites as ranked by Alexa.

MySpace: I am surprised that it has come so far up. I have used it a bit, and found it quite clumsy, non sticky. Would be interesting to find out the number of page views per active registerd member, and compare with other such sites, say Orkut.

YouTube: Truly transformational! An aside: we all have become active producers. More production less consumption. How would this effect advertising? For a later post.

Orkut: Very clean and fresh. Quite unassuming, but fairly sticky. Would be interesting to know how else the traffic can be monetised. Apart from adsense, I mean.

Wikipedia: Lots of neat information. My wife actually uses this quite a bit, preparing for her basic electrical engineering lectures! And now the results pop up with fair regularity in the first few of Google search.

Blogger: Its no newcomer. Wonder if blogger was the first of its kind. It could do with some more templates. Changes in templates should not lose the link information, etc.

Amazon: Should I call it web2.0? Ah well let me grudge this big daddy a little cool-ness. Has defined and adopted much of web2.0. Is redefining web2.0 for the enterprise.

Megaupload: Dont know where this cropped from. Seen once, used never. Offers more space than is available on my system at any time. Guess it is a matter of perception - can the message move from amount of space (which will get commoditized) to something more valuable - ease of retrieval? adding value to data - BI? What else?

Fotolog: Dont understand this - is this a mistake? Google page rank seems to completely ignore this site. How can this feature higher than flickr?

RapidShare: Looks like we need to forget about this. It has become a paid service. They did not have the deep pockets to support the server, bandwidth costs? Shakeout in the web2.0 world?

Craiglist: It is vast! The interface can be very deceptive, but there is a lot happening under the folds. In Bangalore specifically there is not so much happening, but I think it could have a great future. For me it really is a case study of how a pure text interface can be so useful.

Flickr: Deceptively easy to use. A big leap of faith, where you can share anything with anyone.

Hi5: Frankly, I dont know how far any of these networking sites will go. Somebody has to do the next level of thinking... So much production, so little consumption.

Facebook: Ditto as above.

Xanga: Frankly, I need to get a bit deeper into this. Do stay tuned.

Friendster: Not another!

Photobucket: Looks OK. Hah, you thought you would get more, eh?

Google Answers Bids Adieu

If Google Answers has gone, can Yahoo and other be far behind?

Market Research Service Focus?
Compared to the Q&A services reviewed so far on this blog (myLot and Yahoo Answers) Google Answers was really the serious kind. Could see a lot of market research kind of questions being asked on the site, and some being answered.

Here is a sampling that got answered, for $200 apiece:
"List of Professional Wine Storage Faciliites in the US for Private Collectors"
"Radio and TV stations reaching out to "hyper-connected kids" - this one needed case studies.

And here are some that did not get any formal response (again $200 apiece):
"Formula and techniques for Electro-Polishing liquid of Chrome Cobalt alloys"
"Costa Rica online gambling" - need names of the 2000 odd online gambling companies, annual revenues, employees, public traded, etc...

Not Enough Participation
Over the last four and half years, Google got the following number of posts
Category (no of posts)
Arts and entertainment (2749)
Business and money (8639)
Computer (4372)
Family and home (1172)
Health (2399)
Reference, education and news (3120)
Relationships and society (851)
Science (1624)
Sports and recreation (1096)
Miscellaneous (944)

So over four and half years they got about 27,000 posts, or less than two posts each day, for each of the catogories.

And a quick math on the turnover on the site:
The revenue figures on four random pages on the site were $185. 95, 225 and 81, which works out to be $146.5 for 25 questions. Which works out to $158k for 27k posts through the life of this site. Not much really (and Google gets only 25% of the turnover)! I dont think it is significant even if you add the adsense revenue, which must have picked up in the last couple of years.

Observations on this Model
- People are quite generous with tips! $100 on a $200 job!
- But to be fair, some of the $200 questions need a lot of work, and might have cost more in the 'outside' (or should I say 'inside') world.
- The answers are public! Private market research is not.
- Lot of info is based on online search itself. Some do pick up the phone and confirm, before posting answers. On monetizing online search, I guess this is how Google might have started this service - move to move up higher the service value chain, but could not gather enough momentum.
- Some even showcase their search practice (Googlers popularizing Google's search capabilities?)

What could have been different?
Ratings are good, but what if you dont like the answer? Can you withhold payment? Reducue payment? If a person who has a previous consistent lower payment, could that be a factor in the actual payment made? E.g., the payment amount could be value*avg rating.

Is Yahoo Answers too like myLot?

Pardon me if I am a bit cynical about this answers community thing. It sure does build community, but how relevent? And is it really a serious community? With portals adding features to try and make users come back again and again, and actively participate, they seem to foster a lot of junk.

Here is an example from Yahoo Answers:

Somebody asked a question: "How much money exists in the world?"

I would imagine it to get some serious responses. But just in the first six minutes it got seven answers, and some of them are below:

"It's an infinite number"
"just a little more than i have"
"Ask Bill Gates and Ruppert Murdoch. They've got most of it."
"no, but i need more of it"
etc...

It seems people are out there just to generate activity!

What is myLot? Not much, I guess

Their definition is "myLot is a growing community of individuals from around the world who enjoy sharing information, meeting new people, and helping each other out."

'Helping each other' - now, what is that, huh? Helping each other with questions such as "Do you have a car?", "Do you like muffins?" or "Do you have a car?" And they actually got 114, 8 and 27 responses as of last count!

But what ties people together is "Members of the community are rewarded for their valuable contributions through monthly earnings payouts." Is that hope or reason (thanks Venkat!)??

I don't know about web2.0, all that about building a community, which in this case is aLot of nonsense, but it surely exposes the human nature. Or maybe it is simply a reflection of life - what sense does either make :-)

Feed Readers: Good Eating?

A lot of Web 2.0 is about aggregation. There’s just so much out there; users want a lot, but need to find new, more interesting, more ‘fun’ ways to sift through the mind-boggling mass of information. Search is just one aspect – you’ve got to have the information rated, perhaps tagged, then you have to facilitate sharing and recommendations.

Syndicated content is now consumed at impressive rates, and feed readers have been around for a while, saving users time and effort. Diverse sites and sources can be monitored, and the user can access almost real-time updates in one place. Free web-based readers are now multiplying like rabbits…

Speaking of 2.0 features, though, Rojo clearly stands up and takes a bow – it’s ‘Mojo’ rating feature is cool and appealing, it’s tagging is efficient, it offers a contacts feature allowing you to share information among your contacts, and it also lets you recommend feeds. Another thing about Rojo – it’s the fastest updated, beating the other services by almost half a day; and it’s very easy to see what’s hot right now on Rojo.

Features wise, Rojo and Bloglines are quite the cups that runneth over. Google Reader is the fastest off the blocks, closely followed by FeedLounge – which is the only one here that isn’t free by the way; they charge something like $5/month. If you look at Techcrunch, there’s also info about some newer players - Attensa, and Gritwire, sure to be bristling with 2.0 gizmos.

Users will soon be taking the next steps into super-selectivity, going beyond mere recommendations and community. Feedrinse is a case in point, enabling you to be much more picky about what you read. Feed readers will have to keep this in mind as the way to go.

Google Talks Money

Move over Yahoo Finance? Google Finance launched last week, albeit a Beta version. They say it’s different, ‘offering an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies’. The add-ons include company news and info, some good-looking flash charts that allow interactivity in changing things like timelines, and front-page Ajax for that quick market-view switcheroo.

The first reaction has, as first reactions usually go with Google initiatives, been positive, with many initial users liking the clean, simple interface, the charts and so on. The Groups section, coming up soon, is what’s really interesting: stocks will be talked about here, their relative merits dissected, with paid moderators. This is, clearly, the first time that Google will be publishing content under its own flag, on its own site. As John Battelle says on his searchblog, “This marks a rolling shift at Google - the company is getting into publishing, whether or not it wants to admit it.” ‘Portal’ behaviour this is, and one wonders if the old ‘eyeballs’ game will crop up again.

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li was clear that “most mainstream financial site users will stick with their current sources for now, primarily because it's simply a pain to have to re-enter your detailed portfolio information again.” And Google Finance is still quite a far cry from being as useful to the online stock tracker as Yahoo; more features/analytics/research will no doubt be added soon. As a service, however, Google will now be more potent for sure.

The new content-focus is what we take away most from here – and with the kind of search expertise on tap at Google, specific info-sites on just about anything could be just another launch away.

Vastly, Hugely, Web2.0

It’s been a busy week. Amazon’s S3 – standing for ‘Simple Storage Service’ – launched; and it’s supposed to be a ‘scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure’. Great news for developers looking for a storage service backend – just take a look at their costs: something $15/month for 100GB of storage, and $20 for transfer!

It looks like a lot of sense for front end services who don’t want to spend too much on back end, but the question is this: will businesses, even small ones, actually want their infrastructure core (mostly apps bulging with data) to be dependent on 3rd party interfaces? The worries are obviously about pricing/service consistency and, of course, quality. A march has definitely been stolen on Google Drive, though…

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer feels that Amazon is “building a system to sell digital goods”. A step beyond retail it is for Amazon, and it may be as Schmelzer says – “They want to be seen as a platform for Web 2.0 applications”. Now that’s a vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big thing (as Douglas Adams would have said), coming from the ‘world’s largest selection’.

Speaking of Vast, that’s another launch – this time of a search service that extracts and structures classified ads all over the web, and then (hold your breath) makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. With over 15M listings already available for cars, jobs, and personal profiles, Vast already has one of the largest databases. For more, check CEO Naval Ravikant’s blog, startupboy.com. Will it be able to give the bigger job boards a case of jelly knees? The user experience at Vast is still to be improved, apparently, if you take MikeH’s word at smashfly.com

Ether

www.ether.com launched more than a week ago. There wasn’t much to herald it, but it’s seems that this new Web 2.0 gizmo can make some great connections.

A division of Ingenio, Ether enables the sale of services over the Internet by just about anyone, but one would assume that this would be useful to tech people, lawyers, psychologists/counsellors, entertainers, bloggers, and more. “Anyone with something valuable to say can earn money by talking on the phone with their audience,” so sayeth Ether. Ingenio has previously run keen.com, a similar service that has since devolved (?) to adult chats and psychic readings, so some questions are surely being asked about Ether – is it just a rehash?

Some of the usual comments come up about good ideas that fall short of expectations, but one can quite easily view this from another perspective: maybe where these good ideas end up is actually the market that works best for them (some of the services on keen.com are far far away from cheap). A similar service has existed in Germany since 2000 – www.questico.com – and it’s almost wholly focussed on the astrology/clairvoyance domain. An attempt was made to offer financial, technical and medical advice, but nothing came of it.

So, will Ether head the same way? It looks fine on the surface, and folks are understandably excited about the possibilities for certain breeds of professionals. The customer side of it seems a bit hard though – think about this: you want advice (and you usually want it now), but you have to register first and pay upfront. As a seller, you can have a delayed response/callback option which can also be a bit of a turnoff from the other side. Ratings are another issue. Interestingly, there isn’t a pay-per-minute model, as many professionals feel that that doesn’t work very well. However, it’s quick to integrate into a Web site, forum, blog, etc – definitely a plus.

It remains to be seen if Ether can indeed become an e-bay for services.

Sales & Marketing, version 2.0

‘Sales and Marketing people’: more often than not, they’re lumped together like popcorn, and seen as fulfilling essentially the same role. We know that’s wrong – marketing is all about getting mindshare, and selling is all about getting the money. But given what’s happening online, this line is getting increasingly blurry.

We had recently examined behavioral targeting, and it’s clear that the options now available for B-to-C or B-to-B interactions are much more specific, configurable, and more importantly, profitable. With relevant ads showing up in the user’s browser windows, the gap between ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’ has the potential to narrow down to a fine sliver, indeed. When an ad appears on TV, consumers may not yet be ready to buy; when an ad tracks a consumer down on the Internet, based on his recent activity and behavior, he is already primed to hit the ‘add to basket’ button.

With Web 2.0 on everybody’s lips (and everybody’s marketing buzzword as well), companies that think ahead have already begun building online communities, carefully nurturing and encouraging customer ‘evangelists’ who can actually be much more effective at marketing than a huge ad campaign, per dollar spent. Or at least, that’s the assumption.

This ‘virtual sales force’ has enormous potential to create goodwill, interest, and actual purchase of your products/offerings. The sales and marketing angle here is, on the surface, related to the older definition: customer evangelists foster and spread mindshare, so calls that come in can then be handled by your sales team. But now your consumers are your marketers as well… Recognizing the possibilities with such marketing is all very well, but it’s also clear that this is far from being a sure thing. The Skype and Apple success stories may be the blips in the graph. Given the hit-or-miss angle, can this be the new paradigm?

Behavioral Targeting: The Next Steps

Behavioral marketing – we’ve seen it go from a gleam in the online marketer’s eye to the buzzword for 2006. The flitting, busy, tech-savvy consumer is much more demanding, after all. Sophisticated campaigns will be necessary to just grab attention, much less call to action.

There are, of course, all the usual worries about the invasiveness and possible identity theft that can result from behavioral targeting, and buying customer trust looks like it’s going to be an issue for a while yet. In December 2005, TRUSTe announced some ‘Recommended Practices for Downloading Software on Users’ Machines’ – and this is definitely the right step forward. Notice and consent – that’s what’s needed prior to any download, and TRUSTe provides a clear set of guidelines.

Jean-Philippe Maheu, CEO of behavioral marketing company Direct Revenue, recently spoke of tracking cookies as well – “I do not believe that tracking cookies are bad for users; however, I do believe companies that use tracking cookies need to be more transparent with consumers about the fact that they do track online behavior”. He also puts the trust challenge in a nutshell – “A great deal of research exists demonstrating that, while our ability to better serve the consumer grows more and more effective, consumers are growing more and more suspicious of our efforts”.

Going ahead, it seems clear that once trust issues begin to resolve, contextual and behavioral targeting will begin working together. This sort of integration will specifically address those situations when either model doesn’t do the job well on its own. Fusion here can only mean even more sophisticated solutions for online ad campaigns.

Personalized, or behavioral search – it may be in the labs now, but it’s going to be here soon. Behavioral profiling is clearly going to be assimilated completely into SEM world. So watch this space…

Moving Pictures: The New Search

If you’re a video creator/provider, there are now specialized video search engines that will pick up your content and make it available for those inveterate searchers that always want more. At a recent Search Engine Strategies Conference, three execs from video search engines - Suranga Chandratillake from blinkx, Karen Howe from Singingfish, and John Thrall from Yahoo! Search - were pretty much unified on one thing: it’s still ‘early days’ for video search, and that is good. Because now is the perfect time to create and optimize content for this nascent, burgeoning category.

All three companies are hard at work enhancing their lists of content partners, providing platforms for video bloggers, support for Media RSS (fostering openness and choice for independent video publishers interested in promoting/syndicating content), and more. The optimizing hysteria is soon to begin, of course: meta information, smart file naming, page content, audio transcripts for Google use – you’ll hear all about it soon.

It’s really interesting to think about if, or how the advertising ballgame will change with this. Right now, video is still mostly linear, which is why the interactive go-anywhere of the web is so popular. But it’s not a far leap to think of non-linear interactive video, is it? So far, we’ve all seen those uber-cool TV ads that are so well made, they just have to transcend the living room and get in our mailboxes. Like that Honda ad, for example.

As far as the corporate space is concerned, it wasn’t so long ago that video search was called ‘non mission-critical’, or that digital video capture had not yet reached ‘critical mass’ within the organization. This year, however, is clearly one where video search itself will reach that critical mass. The merging of presentation delivery tools, Webcasting, and Search technologies takes this further (see Tim Siglin’s commentary).

All of this sounds great, but here’s the usual roadblock: monetization. It seems clear that since Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords have turned web search into a money-spinner, video analytics is only a few short hops away. Advertisers, after all, have to be able to measure quality and quantity of this emerging audience.

Message Boards: all dried up?

Back in 1997, John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (McKinsley consultants), published ‘Net Gain’ – a book that tried to show how millions of dollars could be made by aggregating virtual communities. Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs and Virtual Communities), in his BBC address, is, however, frankly skeptical about online communities becoming profit-making industries for entrepreneurs. “The greatest impact of virtual communities”, he says, “will not come from advertising revenues for online chatrooms, but from the new forms of culture that will emerge from virtual communities.”

So, is growing sustainable communities around your organization laborious, time-consuming, and largely thankless? If your message boards and chatrooms are well-designed, expertly moderated, and driven by the commitment to broaden communication with all stakeholders, they can be very effective – but this is actually a cost, with no easily measurable ROI.

A look at the general BB space is largely disheartening. Most message boards devolve very quickly into trollscapes, meaninglessness, and bad behavior. Affinity groups (people with learning disabilities, cancer/sclerosis patients, scholars, etc) that show a strong need to communicate are the few exceptions. Big players like Yahoo, however, have just launched new versions of their message boards, so there’s still some kind of business model here that seems to work.

Highly specific boards with firm codes of conduct, targeted at communities that have the affinity, desire, and drive to communicate – that’s perhaps the way to go. The profit model still doesn’t look too good, though. Contextual banner ads are all very well, but when was the last time you clicked on one?

So for the online marketer, message boards should perhaps be approached from a different perspective altogether. A perspective that hinges purely on the community building aspect till value and sustainability are clearly evident: and only then exploring the possibility of profit.