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I was quoted recently in a Global Post article on caste-based communities on social networking platforms in India.

I have earlier written about how caste-based communities on Facebook and Orkut reflects the realities of India’s splintered society.

The ancient Indian custom of caste has made its way into the modern world of social media.

Social networking site Orkut — the most popular social media platform in India — is not only a place where young, urban Indians can connect with friends like Americans do on Facebook. It’s also a platform where they can meet others in their caste… (and) engage in benign discussions and debates on various caste-related issues like marriage, religion and politics.

So what’s happening here on Orkut, Facebook and other social media sites in India? Some argue the country’s young people no longer feel comfortable talking about caste in public. Instead, they retreat to an anonymous online world to debate and discuss issues. Not everyone agrees.

Social media expert Gaurav Mishra said Orkut and similar sites do not increase caste discussions. Rather, they accurately reflect that Indians still very much identify with their caste and want to form groups around them.  Read More

Forbes India named nominated Facebook for 2010 Person of the Year in its December 2010 issue and asked me why it should win.

In a recent post, I shared five reasons why Facebook is good for your soul, so my love for Facebook is no secret.

In the interview, however, I highlight the fact that Orkut, not Facebook, is the default social networking platform for Indians. Orkut introduced Indians to social networking, it’s still much bigger than Facebook in India, and with its recent redesign, it might have more staying power than most people give it credit for. Speaking for myself, I have started spending much more time on Orkut after the redesign than I have in the last year or so.

I also highlight the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook in the interview. Most people use LinkedIn like a rolodex, exclusively for professional networking. On the other hand, Facebook reflects our real world relationships better, where we switch between the personal and the professional, almost seamlessly. LinkedIn too offers a vastly improved user interface after its recent redesign and I expect myself to spend more time on LinkedIn in the coming weeks.  Read More

One of the main themes of my research on digital activism is that social technologies are value-agnostic.

At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

I have written before about Shiv Sena’s militant approach towards Orkut communities critical of the party, its leader Bal Thakeray, or its Hindutva ideology. Caste-based communities on Orkut are another disturbing example of online communities mirroring the dysfunctions in Indian society.

For instance, there are more than 1000 communities for Brahmins on Orkut. There are 461 Brahmin communities listed under culture and community, 591 under religion and beliefs, 87 under activities and 117 under others.

One of the most popular Brahmin community, with 28, 726 members, randomly claims: “we r clever & hardworking .no one can fool us…” The Brahmans community with 41952 members and the Brahmins of India community with 30588 members are also very popular. Another group, Brahmin Culture and Tradition, with 5579 members, is “dedicated to the purpose of uniting Brahmins to revive, preserve, protect and propagate the Brahmin culture to descendants without intimidation or dilution from anti-Brahminical forces.”  Read More

(This is a guest post from Naman Sarawagi (Twitter). Naman is a web 2.0 enthusiast. He has worked with Onyomo.com and Adbhai.com in the past, and now works as a copywriter at Webchutney Studios.)

ZooZoos are advertisement characters promoted by Vodafone during the Indian Premier League Season 2 (IPL). Zoozoos are white, ghost-like creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads who are used to promote various value added services of Vodafone. These ads though look animated are actually real humans in the Zoozoo costumes. The ads were created by Ogilvy & Mather, an agency that handles Vodafone advertisements and the films were shot by Bangalore based Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa.

Here is an analysis of the various social media tools used in the campaign –

- YouTube: In just one month the channel became 24th most Subscribed Channel (All Time- India) with 1,741 subscribers. The number is pretty low but given the low penetration of high speed internet in India this is appreciable. The channel has 129 in-links coming from various blogs. Most viewed ad and also the public favourite in conversations was Vodafone Busy Message generating a total of 197,837 views. We must consider that multiple copies of this video are available on YouTube and other video sharing sites so the real no. of views is pretty high.  Read More

I’m starting off the Global Voices special coverage on the 2009 Indian general elections by analyzing how internet and mobile technologies are transforming election campaigning in India.

Politics in India is essentially local and India’s voters elect their representatives based on small local and regional issues, instead of the big national issues. As a result, election rallies and door-to-door canvassing, supplemented by local hoardings and print ads in the vernacular languages have traditionally been at the core of election campaigning in India.

In 2004, the incumbent BJP broke away from this pattern with its aggressive nation-wide ‘India Shining’ campaign. It recruited advertising and PR agencies to manage its campaign, focused on the urban first time voter, advertised heavily on print and television, and allocated 5% of its campaign budget to an e-campaign, for revamping its campaign website, pushing out text messages, pre-recorded voice clips and emails to its database of 20 million email users and 20 million phone users, and offering campaign-related mobile ringtones for download (BBC/ BBC/ Rediff/ Hindu). The ‘India Shining’ campaign didn’t work eventually, and Sonia Gandhi led Congress to a surprise victory, once again reaffirming the almost magical appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi family amongst India’s voters. Many observers even attributed BJP’s loss to its “elitist” ‘India Shining’ campaign (Live Mint).  Read More

An edited version of my post on online freedom of expression in India appeared in Tehelka recently.

Here’s the full text of the article –

Now, Coups In Cyberspace

Traditional institutions are trying to limit the Internet’s freedom

GAURAV MISHRA

THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE is abuzz with discussions on freedom of expression after the Supreme Court refused to throw out the Shiv Sena’s case against 19-year-old computer science student Ajith D. Ajith is charged with criminal intimidation and hurting religious sentiments for starting an anti-Sena Orkut community in which an anonymous commentator had posted a death threat against Sena leader Bal Thackeray.

However, Indian bloggers are reacting to the controversy mostly based on incomplete information. It’s important that we look at this case in the context of the Shiv Sena’s long history of ideological intolerance and violent protests against journalists, writers and artists who speak against its extremist ideologies. So, when Shiv Sena activists vandalised cyber cafes in Mumbai and Pune between November 2006 and May 2007 to protest Orkut communities that ‘hurt’ their religious sentiments, it was part of a long-established pattern. The protests forced Google to deviate from its policy on sharing private user data and set up an arrangement which enabled Mumbai police to directly ask Google to delete ‘objectionable’ content and ask it for IP addresses and service providers.  Read More

Introduction: Freedom of Expression in the Indian Blogosphere

The Indian blogosphere is abuzz with discussions on freedom of expression after the Supreme Court refused to throw out Shiv Sena’s defamation case against 19 year old computer science student Ajith D (TOI).

However, the Indian blogosphere’s reactions to the controversy are mostly based on reports on the incident in Indian media and the quality of this reporting has been very mediocre, with few details and little background information. As a result, bloggers are reacting to incomplete information.

So, before I do a roundup of the Indian blogosphere’s reactions to the story and share my own views, let me first present the basic facts.

Shiv Sena’s Tradition of Violent Protests

Let’s start with Shiv Sena itself. Shiv Sena is a far right political party in Maharashtra that built a strong base amongst the Marathi community in the sixties based on its militant ideology that Maharashtra belonged to the Marathi community and migrants from other Indian states should be thrown out. Starting from the mid-seventies, the Shiv Sena shifted its focus to a strong pro-Hindutva (and anti-Muslim) ideology, a shift that solidified in the mid nineties, when it became an integral part of right wing alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.  Read More

According to a Comscore report on social networking sites in India, visits to the site category increased 51 percent from the previous year to more than 19 million visitors in December 2008.

Orkut is still a strong #1 with 12.8 million visitors and a 81% growth over December 2007. Facebook is far behind with 4.0 million visitors, in spite of its impressive 150% growth. BharatStudent is a surprising #3 with 3.3 million visitors and a 88% growth.

Other international social networking sites Hi5, MySpace and LinkedIn also did well at #4, #6 and #7 with 2.0 million, 0.7 million and 0.5 million visitors and growths of 182%, 110% and 71% respectively.

The Indian social networking websites Ibibo and BigAdda, however, didn’t do well and fell down by 50% and 25% to 1.0 million and 0.4 million visitors respectively.

I’ll look at the Comscore data with suspicion because it excludes traffic from cyber cafes, an important venue for internet access in India.  Read More

Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.

The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.

The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time.  Read More

Here’s some interesting data on search trends for social networking sites in India using Google Insights for Search data for 2008.

Orkut is way ahead at #1, but stagnant, Facebook is #2 and rising, while Hi5, Ibibo and MySpace are far behind.

The data is consistent with Alexa traffic data for India which ranks Orkut at #4, Facebook at #11, Hi5 at #37, Ibibo at #58 and MySpace #73.

Looking at data from 2004 shows that Orkut suffered serious setbacks in mid 2007, when facebook started to take off.

The statewise search data shows that Orkut has spread even to the most remote parts of India. Facebook, Hi5 and Ibibo also have almost full reach, but they are more concentrated in specific states. MySpace is still to breakthrough into the Hindi heartland of India.

Also see my analysis of search trends for group SMS and microblogging services in India using Google Insights for Search data.

Priyanka Joshi in Business Standard –

Around 20 million internet users actively use the social media sites in India. According to market research firm IDC, the use of social networking sites will continue to grow, but advertising may not necessarily expand along with it. The result is that Indian start-ups like Ibibo and BigAdda are innovating to get brands onto their networks. 2009 might turn out to be the year when marketers will realise the potential of cross-promoting their media buys on the social networking websites.

“Local marketers are becoming familiar with the best ways to promote their businesses and by crossing online and offline campaigns, they are getting more bang for their buck,” said Shivanandan Pare, COO, BigAdda, that commenced operations 15 months back. The brands that are promoting themselves on BigAdda include Nokia, Lenovo, Sony Ericsson and Intel among others.

Ibibo, which calls itself a ‘talent based social networking site’, is willing to bet that 2009 would be the year when targeting consumer on social sites will have a far bigger payout than any other media. Ashish Kashyap, CEO, Ibibo, has built traction for his site among the 14-28 year olds by running talent-based contests since its inception.  Read More

Sahana Mysore at Inside Facebook says that Facebook’s growth in South America is driven by its Spanish translation and its deal with telecom operator Telephonica to allows it direct access from the mobile homepage –

At the beginning of 2008, less than 100,000 people in Argentina (with a population of 40 million) had accounts on Facebook. Now – just one year later – about 2 million Argentines, or 5.3% of Argentina’s population, are on Faceboook. That’s an annual growth rate of over 2000% for the year.

This growth hasn’t been limited to Argentina – other South American countries like Chile, Venezuela, and Peru have also had remarkable growth at rates of 3768%, 1277%, and 328%, respectively.

I’m wondering when Facebook would launch a Portuguese version targeted at Brazil to break Orkut’s monopoly there.

I had recently used Quantcast data to compare the demographic profiles of Facebook and Twitter users.

Loius Gray uses Quantcast data to compare the contribution of addicts (visit website >30 times in a month), regulars (visit website at least once in a month) and passersby (visit website less than once in a month) to the overall traffic at Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and MySpace –

There’s practically a catch-22 in business when it comes to appeasing your addicts. Lose your most ardent users, and you could find them to be your most vocal detractors, as they feel looked over and spurned. But if you appeal too much to your most addicted users, you could overlook some major gaps in your product that prevent it crossing over to the mainstream. How can you convert those casual passers-by into regular users or even addicts? Therein lies the struggle of growth.

The ideal situation for a website is one in which most of the visitors are regulars or addicts. Both MySpace and Facebook have very high engagement and passersby only contribute to 4% of the traffic at MySpace and 2% of the traffic at Facebook. Twitter is in a transition phase where passersby contribute to 26% of the traffic. Friendfeed seems to be in trouble as passersby contribute to 67% of the traffic.  Read More

It’s the season for predictions (see Peter Kim and Rajesh Jain) and here are my top 7 social media predictions for India for 2009 –

1. Citizen journalism will come into its own in India.

We saw a preview of the power of citizen journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack. We also saw that mainstream media is increasingly willing to integrate citizen journalism in its news coverage. News organizations are not only promoting citizen journalism platforms like IBN Live’s Citizen Journalist, but also engaging with platforms like Twitter (see @DNAIndia, @LiveMint, @BangaloreMirror, @IndiatimesNews). We will see a continuation of these trends in 2009. More news organizations will experiment with citizen journalism, both by creating citizen journalism platforms on their own websites and by actively tracking social media for stories and sources.

2. Social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.  Read More

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

In my earlier post on the recently published Universal McCann study, I had written about how we use different communication channels to stay in touch with our contacts.

Perhaps the most important insight in the Universal McCaan study is that we use the internet for expanding our network of contacts but use the mobile phone to maintain our current network.

Here’s another interesting insight from the Universal McCann report: we use social networks for making new friends and personal blogs for socializing with friends –

In the previous post, we found that Brazilians and the Indians are amongst the most social online whereas the Americans are amongst the least social. The same trend can be seen here.

While differences in culture partly explain this significant difference in online social behavior, self-selection is also part of the explanation. Given the low penetration of the internet in Brazil and India, social media usage in these countries suffers from a serious early adopter bias.  Read More

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s the latest world map of social networks based on Alexa data (via Oxyweb) –

– and Indian and Brazil are the only two countries in the world where Orkut is the most popular social network.

I have often wondered what joins Brazilians and Indians in their love for Orkut. The answer is a combination of serendipity, first mover advantage, faster loading time, simplicity of the name, similarity of the name to Hindi/ Portuguese sounds, simplicity of the user interface, and association with the Google brand name, but the most powerful reason is the lax attitude towards privacy common to Indians and Brazilians.

In spite of the contrary results on the Synovate survey on online privacy, both Brazilians and Indians share generally lax attitudes about online privacy.

This is reflected in the much less fine-grained privacy controls (only friends and friend-of-friends), the excessively open, almost exhibitionist profiles (especially by Brazilian women), the very voyeuristic and totally transparent browsing behavior of Brazilian and Indian men (and their tendency to ask strange women to be friends), the general tendency to add strangers as friends, the open “crush” and “favorite” features, and, finally, the open and often spammy scrapbooks.  Read More

Quick Summary: Read why language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian) will be the three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites.

In my previous post, I wrote about why Indian social networking sites need to differentiate themselves –

Most of the Indian social networking sites are basically India-focused Facebook/ MySpace/ Orkut/ LinkedIn clones. Such clones would only be popular amongst a small set of twenty-something Indians in metros who won’t want a clone anyways.

I also presented a typology of Indian social networking sites on a 2X2 matrix with Indian-vs-global social dynamics on the X-axis and Indian-vs-global user appeal on the Y-axis –

– and suggested that –

To really build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.

Three Dimensions of Differentiation: Language, Access and Social Dynamics

Based on the discussion in the comments section and on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, I have realized that there are, in fact, three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites — language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian).  Read More

Quick Summary: To build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.

According to a recent cover story in the Outlook Magazine, there are almost 10 mn users of social networking sites in India. Orkut has 7.1 mn users, Facebook 1.6 mn, BharatStudent 1.7mn, Fropper 1.0 mn, BigAdda 1.4 mn, Minglebox 0.6 mn, adding up to 13.4 mn (tweet). Add smaller social networks, factor in duplication across social networks, and the total user base for social networks in India may be ~10 mn (tweet).

As the number of Internet users in India is estimated at between 20 mn and 30 mn by most sources, at least one third of all Internet users in India now use a social network.  Read More

Quick Summary: In Mumbai? On Twitter? Register for the first Mumbai Twitter Meetup. Not on Twitter? Find seven reasons why you should sign up for Twitter today.

Yesterday, when I tweeted about wanting to do a Mumbai Twitter Meetup —

Blog meets are so passe. I want to do a Mumbai Twitter meet. Anyone interested? (Twitter)

– I received half a dozen responses within seconds.

Within the hour, I had set up a @MumbaiTwit Twitter account, a dozen people had started following it, Aalaap Ghag (@aalaap) and Kapil Bhatia (@kapilb) had posted about the event and Aalaap had set up a Mumbai Twitter Meetup event on Facebook. Phew!

So, if you are in Mumbai and on Twitter, let’s meet up for the first Mumbai Twitter Meetup.

When? 5 pm, Saturday, December 29, 2007.

Where? Flat No A/65, Sea Lord, Cuffe Parade, Mumbai.

If you are planning to attend, here are a few things you should do in the run up to the event –

What is OpenSocial?

TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.

What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?

In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap –

While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.  Read More