Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. I talk about India, Entrepreneurship and the New New Thing. Thanks.

ET reports today that mobile phone handset manufacturers are pre-loading social networking tools and applications on their handsets. I think this is one of the most important pieces of news for the mobile social networking industry as such.

• For users, it means that they can now save hassles of downloading and installing the application.
• For telcos (operators like Vodafone and Airtel), it means better revenues from GPRS usage for these social networking apps (ARPUs are falling by the day and increasingly mobile companies are looking at revenues from VAS).
• For Social Networks, it means larger user base and ease of adoption with every handset that is sold.
• And finally for Handset Manufacturers, it means yet another selling point for their handsets. Although users would not have a network of choice but a network atleast.

I am not sure how would this impact adoption of social networking in India. Actually adoption goes hand in hand with tools. You like a social network, you demand and seek the tools to access it. And once you have the tools to do things, you tinker around with them and get hooked onto the networks. A classical positive feedback loop.

Social network adoption also depends on the friend circle of the user. Social networking is no longer about meeting new people or discovering friends but is about staying in touch with people you already know or people who share common interests. A user would thus want to choose a social network where all his friends hang out. With a social networking app pre-loaded on the handsets, at least a user would give it a try, if not use it all the time (with openID and data portability, a time shall come when all networks would be able to talk to each other. This probably would be a time when a user could be on any network and yet connect with a user on a totally different network. This should accelerate new network adoption etc).

IMHO social networking on mobiles in India is taking so much time to take off because …

1. Low end mobile phone handsets - until your handsets are capable of running Java applications, most (all?) social networking apps simply would not work.
2. Low penetration of GPRS
3. Downloading and Installation issues.

With pre-loaded software, one of the three big hassles have been taken care of. Next logical step for social networks should be to talk to telcos and get discounts on GPRS usage or some kind of incentive mechanism for users to actually start using social networking.

This also has lessons for other online businesses. For example if a Cleartrip.com or TheStorez.com is able to embed a widget in mobile phone handsets, it will give users yet another quick and default option to book that ticket or order that book faster.

What other factors do you think influence mobile social networking adoption in India? Which networks will you bet your money on? And what other implications do you think this embedding would have?

Nokia as a company continues to impress me with their initiatives with Social Media and Interaction with customers. From WOMWORLD blogger outreach (of which I was a small and insignificant part) to Nokia Conversations to enabling people like Jan Chipchase, Nokia does phenomenal work.

The latest in series is an initiative for Nokia N96. Yet again, the idea is fairly simple. They took one N96 and decided to send it on a world tour. Unlike a typical world tour where one person has the ownership, they decided to crowdsource it. They would send the phone to an individual. Each person uses it for a week. And passes it on. Along the way people can upload and share videos on OVI channel, Twitter and obviously write about it on their personal blogs.

Fantastic idea. Apart from touching lives of all these people and people around them, the media and content created with this phone over the tour period would not be less than a treasure trove. I really look forward to the output.

The very fact that I as a mere silent spectator am blogging about it, justifies that the experiment is bound to create some hype.

Costs for Nokia? One N96 handset, shipping across the world from point to point, a webserver. Negligible.

Although Social Networking phenomenon is very old and probably past its peak, I am still intrigued by this very basic question. What do people do on social networking sites?

More than relying on research reports and data gathered by biggies of social networking over the last few years, I would rather introspect and document what I do at these sites. And what my friends do there. For me top three things would be

1. Share and Discover lives - Upload and read update, photos, notes videos etc.
2. Kill time - Games, Movies, Celeb Gossip, Event Planning etc.
3. Discovery of Interestingness - Interesting people, interesting links etc.

What do you see yourself (and people around you) doing on SNS?  What are the top three things? Please share.

Facebook now has over 10 billion photos (via mashable). The numbers for other photo sharing sites are unknown but assuming that Flickr had 2 billion in Nov 07 (and they were growing by 5 million per day, Flickr should have about 5 billion photos), Facebook becomes the largest photo-sharing website.

Can someone give numbers on Orkut, MySpace, Flickr and Picasa … ?

Brings me to a radical idea. If Facebook stated charging for photo uploads, would the reveune stream be sustainable? Would people continue to upload pictures?

Thinking out loud about Flickr, it has evolved into a place where all the aspiring photographers publish their pictures hoping to catch attention of the world. What if there are places like that for all niches? A place where all aspiring actors upload their videos to be seen by directors and producers? A place where all aspiring sportsmen uploaded their videos and profiles to be spotted by talent scouts? Hmmm .. could be interesting. Any thoughts anyone?

Brings me to another point. What do people really do on social networking sites. More than relying on research reports, what do you see yourself and people around you doing on SNS? For me top three things would be

1. Share and Discover lives - Upload and read photos, videos, notes, blogs etc.
2. Kill time - Games, Movies, Celeb Gossip etc.
3. Discovery of Interestingness - Interesting people, interesting links etc.

What are your top three things that people do on networking sites?

Jobeehive.com is an interesting startup in the careers space. The idea is fairly simple and straightforward. If you are looking to work for a certain company, you go to jobeehive, get to know more about the salaries that this company offers, read reviews from employees and alumni and make an informed decision about joining.

In fact this website addresses a really interesting issue that almost every candidate faces. Since reviews are anonymous, they might be unbiased (employee can write without fearing a backlash from employer) and on the other hand, the very anonymity makes the reviews less credible. Its the end user who needs to decided wheather to trust the reviews or not.

Another example of use of social media and crowd-sourcing to create a service that is beneficial to the end user. Since the website is essentially user driven and very new, it does not have a lot of data and information right now. Once the website gets over that network effect, it should be a useful resource. Infact, if Jobeehive wants to be successful they have to have the network effect on their side.

Ashish on pluggd.in did an interesting product review. He says

Jobeehive is neatly laid out and the company page is really done well - you get general info about the company (founding date, revenues, pictures etc) and also, the ratings/reviews and salary details as entered by the users.

What else can Jobeehive do?

• To make the reviews authentic, Jobeehive should have HR managers from these companies ratify or answer objections raised about the company.
• Once there are enough number of people and reviews on the website, Jobeehive can diversify into placement consultancy, employer rating, enabling campus placements and other such recruitment models.
• Jobeehive can also introduce ratings for every individual review. The idea is to make the system trustworthy and pertinent. It could be as simple as a co-rank or as complex as a digg algorithm. Finally, someone who actually takes a decision based on these reviews should be able to ratify these.

Competition

• HT Media’s Shine.com obviously was launched on the premise that Shine can offer you best salaries. They used the salary surveys as teaser to launch the service. In fact Shine Salary Tool was a much talked about feature on their website.
• Criticat.com is an immediate competition that I can think in this space. Criticat is also about employer ratings and reviews. In fact the use of bargraphs makes the navigation easier and more intuitive at Criticat.

Risks

• Just a small feature. For biggies like Naukri.com, salary comparison and employer review is just a small feature that they need to add to their existing website (and thus challenge the very existence of these review websites). Also with the huge network effects in their favor, naukri.com can offer much more value to the end user.

Anyways an interesting concept, a nicely done up website. Do check out the website and share your opinions.

P.S.: They force a user to submit a review/salary report before users can have complete access to the website. It might make a lot of sense for the business but personally I dont like it. Hope they remove it soon :)