Social media in emerging countries like India

India is expected to share a dais with US and China being the third largest internet user base by 2013 - Forrester Research said in a report. There are approximately 81 million internet users in India (as of November2008 which is 7 to 7.5% of Indian population). According to Facebook global report, India is ranked 20^th in terms of number of Facebook users which are growing at the phenomenal rate of 200 to 300% year on year.

Apart from the global players like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn there are plenty on local Indian players like BharatStudents, Bigadda, Chikka, Corners, Frooper, Khichdee, kyakare, OLX, Picsquare, SlideShare, Tezaa, weRead, Zapak, ZoomIn are trying to create their niche in the online market.

Some of the typical profile types on social networking sites are -

• Beginners – New entrants who create their profile on social media sites
• Observers – profile maintenance and explorers of social networking websites.
• Readers - Information like daily news, entertainment, education, job opportunities using Feed/syndication
• Evaluators (critics) – Active users of social media websites, who not only contributes but also spread the word / buzz about happenings on the space of social media.
• Writers (blogs, websites, Twitter)

In most of the emerging countries, the main usage of social media sites are Entertainment, Education, Networking, Job opportunities, Gaming and freely expressing yourself. Good news is that Shopping has entered into this list as one of the use of social media sites recently. Users are inviting opinions from peers and professions for their buying decisions.

I know a friend of mine who expressed wish to buy an ‘ABC’ make and company hatchback car on Facebook. When I asked her why she is interested in that particular make/company car, she had no specific reason apart from that she loved the way it looks. Someone from her friend’s network sent her link from critic’s website, information on how to buy your first car? Etc. Well needless to say she bought a car from different make/company of completely different looks, and by the way she had strong opinion on why this is the best car for her! Isn’t it impressive to see that social media has began to play important role in influencing such high value decisions.

One of the biggest concern people have about social networking sites is ‘Privacy’. My personal information (email and date of birth) along with entire listing of friend/social network get displayed on public domain. The problem is most users (Beginners and Observers) registers on the websites and disappear may be after few visits. Apart from basic password protection, no social media sites protect to guarantee any information shared on the sites. Just like you have ‘buyer beware’ in consumer marketplace, in social media space you have ‘user beware’, aware of what personal information you are sharing and with whom, till the time you have ‘privacy’ guidelines and regulations getting in place.

I am sure that Web 2.0 is a jargon that is living its own place and fame for now. It is no more mere marketing gimmick that web entrepreneurs were selling to its investors and venture capitalists.

In the first place some small players came with their own creative applications for Web 2.0. I will call this Web 2.0A age or rather Web 2.0.1 beta. Such applications then got popularity among users and created a news in web world. That was public version of Web 2.0.1. Some big players of web ignored what was happening around then and some took serious note and started building Web 2.0 applications. Very few intelligently bought the potential competition and started working on integration activities. This was version Web 2.0.2.

With some biggies participating in this with user base increasing day by day everybody jumped on creating and integrating web applications. Seamless movement from one application to other with single login was the mantra with 'unified user experience' tag. This was version Web 2.0.3.

So far every activity happening was limited to coding or development part of the web game. Recently IBM lauched new blade servers that are specially designed for Web 2.0 kind of web applications where traffic is heavy and computing power requirement is high. This I call a version Web 2.0.4. And I suppose the world is now ready for upgraded version of web i.e. Web 3.0.

Every another week, new social network is launched by innovative entrepreneurs. This makes really challenging for social application entrepreneurs & companies  who wish to develop  & implement their social applications across the all popular social networks. Previously there was no choice of generic social application development platform. You need to almost re-engineer social application to make it work on another social platform eg. MySpace/Bebo if its originally developed to work on Facebook. Almost all top social networking sites/plaform have their own proprietary API platform to support social application development & integration.

But now OpenSocial is coming to rescue. OpenSocial is recently launched by Google & it defines a common API for social application development across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers/social entrepreneurs can create their social applications that can access all OpenSocial supported social network's friends and update feeds.

Another major challenge faced by social app entrepreneurs & companies is cost of bandwidth & server requirements. Many social apps which became very successful instantly due to viral marketing failed to stay-up due to lack of proper bandwidth & application hosting environment. Right now Amazon EC2 webservices & similar services are of assistance, still there is a considerable cost & technical management required.

OpenSocial is built upon Google gadgets technology framework. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, complete social applications can be build without separate application hosting i.e. no server at all. OpenSocial also provide option to host social application on social app owner's independent hosting servers. In both cases, Google's gadget caching technology provide breather for bandwidth demands  in case social application suddenly become a  huge success & faces sudden surge in traffic.

OpenSocial looks like will help to tackle both major challenges (multiple application platform & cost involved in bandwidth/hosting) faced by social application developers & entrepreneurs. Still we need to wait for some time to judge its success, as its still in beta & not supported by few key social networking platforms like facebook.com.

Today it'€™s my first post on e-Zest corporate blog and I am very much excited to see lot of interest from readers and within e-Zest in very short span of time. Right now IT world is talking about state of US economy and its impact on outsourcing and specifically offshore outsourcing of IT and ITES services. In the flat world business dynamics are changing fast and I believe innovation in business processes, product and services,business models and service delivery approaches will be key factors in competitive success of organizations worldwide.

I see three key technology drivers having major impact in 2008 for consumer products or services accessed using browsers and business applications used by enterprises for managing business processes. Maturity of social media applications and Web 2.0 technologies, Industry wide acceptance of Software as a Service(SaaS) delivery based business applications and few success stories of successful implementation of service oriented architecture(SOA) based enterprise business platforms.

We should not see each of these technologies as silos growing independent of each other, rather convergence of Web2.0 technologies, SaaS delivery and SOA will drive major business innovations in next few years. We should also understand that recession in USA will drive faster adaption of this technology convergence than adversely affecting this, as pressing bottom-lines, cost cutting, personal pressure driving need for social space and need for integration of existing platforms and services for integrated solutions offerings will drive key business innovations. 

Have you thought of this in your business plan for year 2008?