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People who have been following me on Twitter know that I’m semi-addicted to it (in bursts).
I totally love the scope of what Twitter allows me to do; what I don’t like is that it doesn’t allow me to send updates from my mobile phone using an Indian number.
Enter chittR, India’s own micro-blogging service, with broadly the same set of features that Twitter started with. You can send and receive updates from web, IM and mobile. You can also follow other people’s updates and track who is following your updates.
It’s only a start, however and the team behind chittR needs to ask themselves three questions -
- How to give people who are already using Twitter a reason to start using chittR?
One reason can be the ability to send updates to an Indian mobile number. The other reason can be a very cool Indian themed design. The third reason can be the presence of lots of friends who are not on Twitter.
- How to improve user-experience, especially for those who are already using Twitter?
chittR needs to reduce the spamminess of its site by getting more users who are giving updates under their real name/ photo. chittR also needs to allow users to control who is seeing their updates. Finally chittR needs to be much faster to load.
- How to scale up by getting word of mouth buzz and third party apps?
I think Twitter really took off because influential Twitter-philes like Robert Scoble and Steve Ruble went gaga over it. Then SXSW happened, third party developers started developing apps for Twitter, and Twitter really exploded. chittR is already getting some good blog buzz, now it need to quickly improve user-experience and improve functionality through third party apps.
I have been chatting with the people behind chittR and will probably update this post later in the evening with a small interview on what they are planning to do with chittR.
Gauravonomics rating for chittR: 2.5/5.
Comments (3)
Good stuff, dude!! Looking forward to seeing it as a success.
Very good review Gaurav. Not used twitter, but found chittr more useful following people and getting updates from them on web,IM or SMS.
You rightly pointed out it’s just a beginning, chittr team adopted flash for their development, so it’s certain pages takes time to load. But I liked desktop experience, it’s certanly not like any other HTML site. But UI has to improve, they need to utilise mind-blowing grapics offered by flash.
Gaurav, any updates on ChittR ?
I was also wondering who are the people behind it.