Creating a not-so-social network!

The Hindu Business Line , Friday, January 10, 2014
Correspondent : Venkatesh Ganesh
Most 23-year olds spend their days tweeting stuff, liking friends’ updates on Facebook or posting pictures on Instagram. Sahil Bhagat, however, had slightly different ideas occupying his mind. The 23-year-old decided to create a social media Web site all by himself. Vebbler is a social networking site where kids can hang out and a place where some amount of privacy can be exercised.

Main Idea

Once a child is on the network, individuals can share specific relationships, control photo tags, lock posts, choose whom you want to appear online to and so on. The logic is simple - suppose you are on holiday, you might not want to talk to your colleagues but wouldn’t mind catching up with friends and family. On Vebbler, because relationships are structured, you can simply switch off your workmates’ layer in one swipe and connect with others instead. This feature is currently not available on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

At Vebbler, we want to make connecting and sharing online similar to how our real life relationships work, says the spiky haired boyish looking Bhagat. The fascination for doing something in the social media space started four years ago when Bhagat (then 19 years old) worked for a digital media agency called Doodle Works. At the same time he was also contributing towards a social media initiative called Frogster.com. Frogster was a platform that brought together like-minded people passionate about causes that plague the world today such as corruption, climate change, poverty etc. Frogster didn’t work out as planned. “Unfortunately, Frogster was too niche a platform and could not scale in the way we had visualised it. At that time, we decided to make a mainstream social platform in which causes could, someday, be a part of , admits Bhagat.

It was during this period when Frogster was getting remodelled as Vebbler, Bhagat and his team saw two shifts in the social networking domain. First, there were different types of relationships that every profile on social media connected with and maintained. These could be parents, teachers, colleagues and even bosses, something that didn't exist before 2010, he says. Second, issues regarding online privacy and collecting user data were becoming an increasing concern with social networks that were in the process of trying to make platforms more ‘open’.

With more social media, the aspects of frauds and criminal activity online also started increasing. People today are afraid of exposing their entire social graph and unfortunately today's platforms do not do a very good job of segregating different relationships, according to Bhagat. This brought up a logical question as to why if digital lives are an extension of real lives, then why are online relationships not similar to our real world relationships? Thus, the team came up with Vebbler as an alternative to existing Web sites which offers a space where people can connect with any type of relationship beyond friends in a single network, without the other network getting access to it. Bhagat and his team calls it ‘The Crowd Layering Model’.

This is done by adding more filters, which ensures different feeds for different kinds of relationships. Then one can set privacy controls on who gets access to which network. This is a different model when compared to Google or Facebook. This means both the person sending the request as well as accepting the request has to layer the connection into a relationship type, explains Bhagat.

In order to keep the quality of relationships high, a person can connect with a maximum of 500 connections. An individual can, ‘follow’ people they might not know but want to stay connected with in case they share similar interests (not unlike Twitter), thereby striking a good balance between personal networking and interest-based networking.

Another big concern in social media networks is with regards to the way photos are shared and tagged. On most social platforms today, if A tags his friend B, B gets all the owner rights to tag any person outside A’s sharing option. In Vebbler, only the owner can choose which people have the right to tag other people, says Bhagat. All this has resulted in some success. Bhagat says that the company has 45,000 users from 70 odd countries and 35 per cent of its users are outside India from countries such as US, United Kingdom, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Initial Challenges

Indian designers still do not rank amongst the top when it comes to user interface design on the Web. “The biggest challenge was to build a product in the social media space that can compete both aesthetically as well as functionally with other products across the world,” agrees Bhagat. Here his user experience expertise coupled with his colleague Ripal Kadakia, who heads the technical side of the business, came in handy.

The venture is currently bootsrapped and Bhagat does not rule out funding possibilities in the future. Ventures like this need to have a strong technology backbone coupled with constant marketing efforts, all of which require funds.

The site can be accessed from mobile phones too and business would come from online advertising or tie ups with entities to use Vebbler as their platform of choice- whether to conduct video-based courses, access photos or search for like-minded people. While the plans are ambitious, the biggest challenge would come when it acquires more users. Also, the company is banking on the increasing frustration over Facebook’s lack of adequate privacy concerns. Whether Vebbler succeeds in wooing these users is when the men will be separated from the boys.

venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

 
SOURCE : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/weekend-life/creating-a-notsosocial-network/article5557771.ece?homepage=true
 


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