Cashless Carnival

The growing obsession for social networking portals among the current breed of entrepreneurs and the VC community in India is something that I’d never been able to appreciate so far. It looked like a passing fad to me which would lose steam soon, until I read about two networking sites [US based] Damsels In Success, a networking site for professional women and, Playboy U; a non-nude networking site launched by the same group who come up with the lustful periodical.

Though, Playboy U is not about social relationships around common interests of people, Damsels in Success is. It is just that my corrupt mentations about Playboy helped me concretize the point I am trying to drive here about Verticalized social networking which revolves around common values, visions, ideas and interests of people. Consider the Indian scenario, our population, the fact that 50% of our population is below 25 years and are internet savyy, can there be a better playground?

So far, we’ve just had horizontal networking portals in India meant for a generic set of people like college students. There is so much space for segmentation of this horizontal into verticals, say portals only for music lovers, movie lovers, photography and so on. And then when you are part of so many of them, there will be a need for one portal where you could access all your other portals [the way meebo works for IM’s].

I strongly believe that a B2C venture is relatively easier to manage than a B2B one. It consumes moolah but most of it is for commoditized services like branding, advertising etc which are not part of the system and are not entitled to a share in the final loot. I know I am sounding like a capitalist here, so what? If the name of the game is to make money, doesn’t smaller and leaner mean bigger?

The Social Networking space is here to stay and should witness a lot more action, probably till people re-discover more personalised ways of social networking like Kitty Parties, Rotary Clubs, Lion Clubs, Carrom Clubs etc. Hmm ?