{"id":7506,"date":"2008-05-28T14:59:30","date_gmt":"2008-05-28T14:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brants.wordpress.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2008-05-28T14:59:30","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T14:59:30","slug":"india-still-shining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2008\/05\/28\/india-still-shining\/","title":{"rendered":"India Still Shining"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d written a post earlier<\/a> on local sites. Happened to come across another one yesterday. Its called indiashines.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To summarise what the PR note<\/a> had to say about the site, the need gap identified is a social network plus site which understands the “diverse language, cultural and regional requirements”\u00a0needs and one that’s therefore customised to Indian needs. Hmm, so what all does it offer? The typical social networking offering of connecting with friends and family and sharing photos, videos etc along with privacy tools, a classifieds (including jobs), options to customize home pages with regional weather, photos, jobs, maps and news. And of course, how can anyone not have blogs? \ud83d\ude42 They’re saying exactly what you’re thinking – “YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Craigslist, Flickr, Monster.com combined with the Weather Channel on one website” and localised. And wait, recommend it to friends, and you’ll get a rupee per friend.<\/p>\n

Few small things that\u00a0I thought were well done – \u00a0it automatically took me to a Bangalore page, but with the option to change my city, and thats quite a lot of cities thats listed there. The weather, the map, the profiles are all bangalore. They have done a very decent job on the news, by taking feeds from sites as varied as Techtree, the Hindu, Exchange4Media, HospitalityBizIndia and all Bangalore specific news. All of these worked for Agartala too, so its a pretty good job.<\/p>\n

The photos, music\u00a0and videos are a bit dicey- though it changes with cities, the content somehow doesnt match. eg. Tamil movie trailers in Agartala. The classifieds and ‘deals’ haven’t been worked on yet because irrespective of city, apun sirf Mumbai dikhayega!! Thats on the homepage, though. Once inside, it shows local content.<\/p>\n

The community part is very interesting. A small digression, I was able to navigate inside quite easily even without logging in, and that includes browsing profiles. Thankfully, I wasn’t allowed to judge whether they were hot or not (yup, its prominently displayed in the profile) without logging in. The layout and\u00a0items inside (testimonials, upcoming birthdays etc)\u00a0reminds me a lot of Orkut. But\u00a0hey, they even have a ‘Poke me’ button. But wait, its not just all ‘Add to shopping cart’ from other sites eg. something very interesting i noticed –\u00a0imagine\u00a0your blogger account\u00a0being connected to Orkut and posts coming in the newsfeed in your profile? Thats something these guys have done. Very interesting.<\/p>\n

Now, while you have groups, the listings and ratings feature in Yahoo Local is not to be found here. But a mashup of this and Yahoo Local (hey, no harm in thinking of possibilities) would create that locality based social networking phenomenon that I’d want to see. Who do you think has better chances at getting there first (humour me, just assume they want to), the above mentioned entities or Tolmolbol<\/a>?<\/p>\n

until next time, tol mol aur bol \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d written a post earlier on local sites. Happened to come across another one yesterday. Its called indiashines.com. To summarise what the PR note had to say about the site, the need gap identified is a social network plus site which understands the “diverse language, cultural and regional requirements”\u00a0needs and one that’s therefore customised to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,15],"tags":[128,130,260,289],"class_list":["post-7506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india","category-social-networking","tag-indian-startup","tag-indiashinescom","tag-tolmolbol","tag-yahoo-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}