Rediff’s Open Platform Initiative Sociali Goes Live; Only 11 Apps?

Rediff has gone live with applications on their video sharing platform iShare, just in time for the announcement of their second quarter earnings results. What’s rather odd is that they appear to have gone live with only 3 applications so far:
– Qwiz (160 users)
– Dedicate A Song (516 users)
– OMG It’s SRK (Oh My God, It’s Shah Rukh Khan) (76 users)

Take a look at 3 applications around this clip

Only 11 Apps In 3 Months?
Rediff had created a separate social network Social, as a “sandbox” for application developers to test their apps. I logged in, only to find a list of just 11 apps, three of which we’ve mentioned above. The rest:

– Groups (create groups, 11 users)
– Rocks Papers Scissors (133 users)
– Gifts (gifts for friends, 162 users)
– ulaT-palaT ke joRo (Word Game, 47 users)
– aTuniTu joDinchu (Word Game, 12 users)
– tAvi tAvi joDicer (Word Game, 14 users)
– ulaToon-palaToon joDA (Word Game, 28 users)
– Events (manage your events, 22 users)

(Screencap of apps page)

So what’s going on with Rediff? Remember that in the last earnings conference call, Rediff CEO Ajit Balakrishnan had said that “Our platform is such that almost every 10 days to two weeks, you’re going to see new verticals open.” An entire quarter later, it’s just iShare, and just 11 applications. Have there been some technical glitches, is there simply no developer interest, are there not enough application developers in the world, or is there something in the terms and conditions that developers don’t agree with?

Perhaps, it’s just that applications going live and spreading will attract more developers. In that case, the entire success of the developer platform depends on the update.

Related:
– Sociali: Rediff’s Social Network, Or Just A Developer Sandbox?
– Rediff Earnings Call With Ajit Balakrishnan: Why Rediff Opened Its API
– Rediff To Open Up Its API; Launching Developer Platform Based On Facebook Markup Language, OpenSocial

Sociali: Rediff’s Social Network, Or Just A Developer Sandbox?

Rediff has launched what appears to be a fairly basic social network called Sociali. While Rediff has told WATBlog that it is just a sandbox for testing applications by developers for their developer platform, also called Sociali, the site does have the functionality of a basic social network. We’d reported on the launch of Sociali in July.

I just signed up for Sociali, and to start off, I was given the option of importng my data from Orkut (Google’s social-net), and/or add friends from email (a way to get more users on board). The site allows users to write on another users wall/send scraps, and maintain both personal and professional profiles. Like I said - a basic social network. The additional functionality comes from applications, which this will indeed work as a sandbox for - Rediff currently has 13 applications active on the network. I searched for some people on Sociali, to get an idea of how many have registered, and it appears that Rediff has ported user profiles from Connexions to Sociali.

Opportunity:
I think the success of Sociali as a social networking site depends entirely on its integration with other products in Rediffs portfolio. This can work in two ways -

Firstly, a users Sociali profile page can be his window to the content and communities he has subscribed to on Rediff. This will make content discovery easier, and increase interaction among users.

Secondly, it will allow users to discover others - for example, if a user with a Sociali profile comments on a news story, others can discover more about him via his Sociali page - comments on other news stories, videos uploaded on iShare, blog posts on iLand. These interactions around content can be a far richer experience for users, than merely identifying users from their friend circle, which is the norm on social networking sites.

Challenges

While Rediff does claim to have 12-12.5 million users, how many of these are active? While it won’t be much of an issue to getting a userbase for Sociali - as evident from the fact that they’ve ported users from Connexions to Sociali - getting users to use the site instead of Orkut, Facebook or Hi5 will be an issue. Frankly, I’m suffering from Social Network fatigue, and now only using Twitter.

Rediff Earnings Call With Ajit Balakrishnan: The Classical Advertiser Is Coming Online; Only Google And Yahoo Competition In India; Why Rediff Opened Its API

Opening Up The API - Why, and Which verticals are going to follow iShare?
Our platform is such that almost every 10 days to two weeks, you’re going to see new verticals open. iShare was the challenging one, so we did that first. You’ll find that in Q&A, in news, in Mail, once the new mail platform is introduced. Within three and three and a half months, our entire 12-12.5 million users will be accessible to application developers, initially through the Facebook Markup Language, and OpenSocial as well.

Making yourself a programmable platform is an irreversible direction in which portals have to go. The reason for that is very long term, indeed. The number of application developers in the world is estimated at a billion developers worldwide. It will be absolutely foolish to try and match their talent with in-house development. This (companies opening up the API) is as significant as when the first Microsoft Office products came out. An investment in this has been made over the past two years - the cost of doing this - 80 percent is manpower. The cost is in attracting the right talent, it’s not counted in the millions of dollars but the energy invested. I expect that the future exponential growth for us will happen on the back of applications that get added to our platform.

On The Advertising Scenario
April-June has historically been a slow start, but much less of a hit this year. The upcoming quarters may have some challenges associated with that. The consumer finance sector accounts for a lions share of advertising - the credit card and home loan companies. Interest rates have gone up, and banks are tightening credit. That’s a challenge for many of these companies. The second category is the jobs category. 40-50 percent of their revenue comes from IT recruitment, which isn’t as hot anymore. The third is travel sector, and right now there’s a standoff between them and low cost airlines who will not pay commissions from October. I think these problems will get resolved by the Oct-Dec quarter.

More on the Advertising scenario and competition - (more…)

Rediff To Open Up Its API; Launching Developer Platform Based On Facebook Markup Language, OpenSocial

Update: As per the official press release, Rediff the initiative is called Sociali. What’s most interesting - and most commenting on the initiative don’t appear to have realized this - is that the opening up of the API extends beyond Rediffs social applications like connexions, iLand and iShare. This means that it will eventually be possible to create applications for the news portal (Rediff mentioned apps like creating a timeline for news). The one I’m looking forward to most, are applications for Rediff Moneywiz…how about a “Create your own Index” app?

Original story: You’re reading it here first: MediaNama has learned that Nasdaq listed Rediff.com is planning to open up its API for developers, allowing them to create applications. We’re not sure of when Rediff is officially going to announce this, but a confirmation comes by means of a link - http://developer.rediff.com/ . Rediff is offering grants of Rs. 250,000 for innovating application ideas. Details on the documentation here.

The word is that iShare, Rediff’s video sharing platform, will be the first service to be be opened to developers. Interestingly, Rediff has decided to comply with the FBML(Facebook markup language) and OpenSocial. Looks like there’s money to be made for application developers - to create an Apps Economy.

Thoughts on Apps

This is interesting in the context that at Proto yesterday, I was discussing “Application Fatigue” with a few people. A month or so ago, I logged into Facebook, and individually deleted most of the applications that I’ve subscribed to. I prefer Facebook Mobile anyway, because its cleaner and more usable. In fact, someone mentioned that they’ve actually begun to appreciate Facebooks core features much more now.

Perhaps this is natural progression for the Apps space - that only the ones that offer significant value to a user will sustain, and the others will die after a limited time-span of success. That’s a thread that persisted throughout the day yesterday at Proto - people spoke of SEO for Blogs, “Viral Coefficient” and other jazz, but my take is that while virality will get you new users (and “uniques”), but it is repeat usage that counts, and that only comes if there is value in your product and content.

What kind of growth do you want? A spike (sharp rise, sharp fall), or a sustained one?

What this means for Rediff

Most important aspect of this development is that it allows Rediff to reduce expenditure on developing new features, with an incentive (revenue share) for developers. Any established company has processes, systems - and perhaps too many heads - that slow down development and innovation. Which is why people expect real innovation from startups, and not large corporations. This effectively is outsourcing of development, with long term monetary incentive for developers.

(PS: you may also send up an anonymous tip-off here)