Social Networking on the web has become very popular in India in the last few years with the increased number of internet users specially belonging to the age group 15+. According to some surveys, India is the seventh largest market for social networking after US, China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and UK. Social Networking had been around since quite a few years, but now India is also not far behind. Social Networking sites are a great instrument to connect you with your friends, family, relatives and school college alumini students or proffessioanl partners. On social networking websites you can share your up to date personal information like work, contact, birthday, education etc. Also, you can upload your recent pictures and share them with your friends. The updates can be made through a phone also. Here is a list of the most popular social networking websites in India.
Facebook is a social networking service and Web site launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students in 2004.
orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. An orkut user can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. A new feature in orkut is Changing Themes.
Google+, a social network operated by Google, Inc., launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products, including Buzz and Profiles. One key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing within subsets of your social group, which are what Google calls Circles. Circles are simply small groups of people that you can share to, each with names like friends, family, classmates and co-workers. Also within Google+, Google has created a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. Another feature that’s widely discussed is “Hangouts,” Google’s new group chat feature. Google+ includes an image editor, privacy options and sharing features.
Bharatstudent.com is a social utility that brings together all the young Indians living across the globe. It is for every Young Indian who is a student or a non-student, fresh graduate, a working professional or an Entrepreneur, and is focused on providing comprehensive solutions for any personal and professional issues. India is the country with the highest number of young people in the world. Bharatstudent.com targets this demographic segment with many networks – Students in schools / colleges, Fresh graduates, Employees in corporates, Young Entrepreneurs, Groups of Artist / talented youngsters in different regions.
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as “the SMS of the Internet”. Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 4 August 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Turkish. LinkedIn’s CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com. One purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections.
hi5 is a social networking website based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi. By 2008, comScore reported that hi5 had become the third most popular social networking site in terms of monthly unique visitors. Bill Gossman was appointed CEO in April 2009, and since that time, hi5 has refocused itself as a social gaming platform and opened itself to new game developers. hi5 has many features common to social networking sites, such as friend networks, photo sharing, user groups, and status updates. Since the site’s redesign in 2009, hi5 has added a number of features oriented toward gaming and entertainment.
Ibibo which stands for iBuild, iBond, is an Indian social networking site. It is an umbrella site that offers a variety of applications under its social network. Ibibo was founded in January 2007 by Ashish Kashyap who had formerly served as the Head of Indian Sales and Operations for Google. Kashyap currently serves as the company’s CEO. Ibibo is funded by the electronic media arm of South African company Naspers, MIH. China-based Tencent has expressed interest in a long term capital deal. The company has recently tied up with Fashion TV for a photography competition. Ibibo’s tool iFreshface lets aspiring models feature and promote their modelling portfolios within the social network.
BIGADDA is a social networking website owned by Reliance Entertainment, part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. It claims to be the largest and the fastest growing youth networking site in India. BIGADDA claims that the top 20 cities account for 45% users from within India while 40% of the users come from Tier III cities. With this site, Users can upload and share unlimited photos for free. Users can upload and share music, and can listen to a varied range of songs. Dataquest, a popular IT journal also featured BIGADDA along with sites like IndyaRocks & BharatStudent as one of the top 25 web 2.0 start-ups in India.
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors. Myspace was founded in 2003 and was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 workers. Since then the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs and by June 2011, Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200.
Other popular Social Networking Sites in India are Fropper.com, MyIndoSpace.com, IndianKarma.com, ApnaCircle.com, Indiaza.com, India-Passions.org, Google Buzz, Yahoo! Pulse, PerfSpot.com, Shtyle.fm, Tagged.com, QuePasa.com, Indyarocks.com, itimes.com, Yahoo! Buzz, Zedge.net, Digg.com, Allindians.com and many more.
