Morever ASSOCHAM survey  in a press release says – Almost each day, an average corporate employee spends an hour, gluing to various social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Linkdein etc. for ‘romancing‘ or otherwise drive some satisfaction out of it…with this average corporate employee’s each day working is reduced by an hour from 8 hours to 7 hours.

Young professionals join the social networking sites the most. It also reveals that 93% of youngsters are aware of social networking sites. Orkut and Facebook are found to be the most popular online destinations among survey respondents. 73% of aged 45-58 spend over an hour online daily to use online sources to access news.

On the other on same note and on same day an interesting reports by CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) says that growth momentum of the services sector in India has increased during April–October 2009, compared to the same period during 2008. If one has to go by ASSOCHAM than productivity has already been lost than how can the same sector is showing growth without productivity of their employees. Two reports by two different ace business & commerce bodies in India and so much in contrast to each other.

Here ASSOCHAM is getting hypothetical as at least in software, web or even marketing sector employees are working for more than 8 hours each day officially and might even go beyond that unofficially. So, one hour less because of  social networking which is bringing productivity down is somehow hypothetical. Each day if one hour is getting less in employees working hours than how much “extra-hours” are being included should have been in the survey.

Morever, ASSOCHAM used word “Romancing” as reason for social networking surfing, Unaware of the fact that online activities such as online news reading through live feeds as in facebook,twitter etc., professional networking and job hunting through these Pro-networking sites and blogging are rising in India more than just one reason of “romancing” on social networking sites.

The above findings of ASSOCHAM are arrived at a random survey, carried out by the ASSOCHAM Social Development Foundation (ASDF) in which nearly 4000 corporate employees were interviewed between age group ranging from 21-30, 31-45 and 46 -60 years in metros and towns such as Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin, Indore, Ahemdabad, Surat, Mumbai, Pune, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Luckow and Kanpur.

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Interestingly the reports also shows some very positive aspects of India’s online activities such as writing blogs, using micr-blogging services, uploading videos and photos where it leads most countries (user volume in millions) like UK, Germany, Australia, Italy, France, Germany and Japan. Moreover, when it comes to percentage of total online users – More people in India write their own blogs and use Micro-blogging services in India than US.

The report is extremely useful for all those who are on verge of starting any internet or web startups in India or any countries listed in this report or planning to have one, with all these social web involvement matrix one can plan out a specific traits, features in their websites, portals or internet services to take advantage of what people are more prone to do with doing activities more than others.

Global Map of Social Media – December 2009 –

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Google Sites ranked as the most visited Internet property worldwide with 854 million unique visitors age 15 and older in July, an increase of 18-percent during the past year. Nearly 75 percent of all Internet users worldwide visited the Google Sites property, which accounted for 9.4 percent of all time spent online. Nearly one out of every ten minutes a person spends online around the world is spent on a Google site.

In India, Google Sites accounted for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2 percent), maps with Google Maps (63.9 percent), multimedia with YouTube (82.8 percent). It also commanded slightly less than half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6 percent) and email with Gmail (46.8 percent).

“It’s interesting that the dynamics of Google usage would be so similar in Brazil and India given that the two markets are on opposite sides of the world and quite different culturally from one another,” said Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America.

“As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets. Google’s prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking.”

Source: comScore World Metrix and comScore qSearch

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Apart from chatting with other users on Dhingana, the Community IM feature also allows users to chat with all their friends from a variety of other networks like Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail etc. Users can also share music albums, songs, playlists, videos with their friends with just 2 clicks using the nice built in “share” feature.

Meebo with its Community IM! Meebo is partnering with leading online communities such as Piczo, Flixter and yaari.com to deliver free, integrated, Web-based instant messaging (IM) to users. Meebo Community IM is designed to facilitate live interaction and real-time conversations between members of online communities such as social media, gaming, and blog networks.

Although when I tried it personally over Firefox/ Vista, I had problem in signing in and status shows as offline. I believe though that its quite good mixture of IM along with music, songs and playlist sharing.

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In India more and more Professional Networking sites are coming in and not from just small scale start-ups but big brands too such as Times of India Group and Info Edge (company behind 99acres.com, naukri.com).

Here are few top Indian based Professional Networking sites that are making quite good impression over Indian audience.

Brijj.com is online professional network from same company who is behind 99acres.com and Naukri.com, the networking site launched in August 2007 and still in beta, has now gradually emerging as choice of people’s own pro-networking site.

PeerPower.com is another big brand supported Pro-networking community portal and little different to other networking portals in its peer portal. The portal is flagship of Time Business Online Pvt. Ltd. and its too in beta mode earlier it was in closed beta users mode.

SiliconIndia – It is one most rapidly growing professional networking although carry more of a news aggregating site’s features and traits. The home page consist of news pieces and stories rather than any professional network portal although when when navigated deeply will how you few good professional communities, groups, jobs and career related content.

Kreeo.com – Kreeo is a web based knowledge-based networking for companies, individuals and institutions who can build their own networks of knowledge along with tools such as news feeds, content sharing and forums etc.

ApnaCircle is one of the first Professional and career networking sites in India among all in this list. Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail creator is among core producers of the portal. The portal has both social and professional networking features is frequently making changes to lure users.

SysInclude is professional networking for IT professionals, the portal at moment is by invitation only. Moreover the portal offer two kind of account one is individual and other corporate account, while the former one is free and later is paid and will have more features that will help manage the recruiting process and have better search capabilities for corporates.

Wapr.com – its is perhaps the most recent entrant in business & professional networking portals in India. Its a bit different portal in its niche, providing some really nice features for both companies and professionals as their different user-base and targeting them differently.

iProBook – This is one professional networking portal yet to be released though i found its underground URL from google here as iProbook in Labs. The portal has clean and user friendly UI and plenty of good interactive features and all about creating and managing your business/ professional networks. What impressed me is its clean UI and use of ajax scripts at perfect places.

TooStep is yet another professional community portal, however it gives an impression of some portfolio management tool or so, reason being fragmented UI and its content element. The portal is more about building community of professional and exchange, discuss, debate about topics, ideas etc.

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Facebook seems to eying Indian social networking arena as the company which is second largest Social networking site in India launched in 5 Indian regional languages – Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Punjabi as Hindi is already available in facebook, making total of 6 Indian languages for Indian online audience.

Facebook has got substantial growth in user base in India in short span of time infact largest gaining social network in India in terms of user base in year 2008.

The all 6 languages availability would also give boost to facebook apps in these languages and also target more rural audience in India.

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In year of 2008 a load of other social network has saw a incredible growth in traffic in terms of unique visitors top being – Facebook, Hi5 and MySpace sites. However, Orkut remained the favorite in India. The comScore report also predicted that Social Networking in India will continue to provide space for other players as well provided they have right blend of both a strong brand and cultural relevance.

Noticeably, the Indian players in the list have to do some act of redemption or simply rework their portals as apparent in the report social networks made in India such as ibibo.com, BigAdda.com are showing negative change in visitors attention and to my belief creating hype more that what one possess will do nothing but annoy users. The difference in majority of Indian startups are very much visible, though I am reluctant discussing it as seen in comments of IndianWeb2.com a lot of people have been offended.

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In India Agriya Infoway a chennai based web solution company provide ready made social network software called Kootali with a price tag of $247 and contains all the features you would expect in a professional social network package, friends, albums, sending messages, groups, events and more. Interestingly the company also provides other scripts as well such as social bookmarking script, video sharing software.

In a similar fashion another chennai based company i-netsolution provide commercial PHP based Orkut Clone with similar layout/ look-n-feel as Orkut is having along with admin interface so any amateur HTML developer can run it likewise to blogging software, watch the user view of same here.

iScripts.com is providing an another PHP based open source online community portal script called iScripts SocialWare with all social networking portal features with mulitple theme/ layouts along with Gift store that can support real gifts or virtual gifts. This open source script will cost you as low as $99.

Free Open Source Scripts

Inspite of all these commercially available scripts there are more free open source scripts available than commerical ones to host install them on your own servers and play with and monetize it for you own good such as PHPFox, Elgg, Dolphin etc.

MakeUseOf has published last year 5 Best Open-Source Social Networking Softwares and Mashable’s 10 of the Best Open Source Social Platforms have listed some of the chosen one among them.

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creADivity

creADivity has, within it, a marketplace which brings potential clients in touch with creative enthusiasts such as management and design students, free-lancers, professional designers and artists. The creatives can also collaborate among themselves using custom built professional networking tools made available to them by creADivity.

creadivity.com is TiE-EAP venture better known as Entrepreneurial Acceleration Program (EAP) of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). On revenue model side creADivity charges 15% from what creative people, freelancers, artists make money on the site while prices for companies, SMEs looking for services from creaAdivity ranges from humble 3000 INR to 20000 INR and the services includes communication campaigns, logo designs, web designs, poster designs, corporate stationary and other relevant industry based marketing services.

As per concept i.e. ‘CrowdSourcing‘ on global scale its already catching up in other corners of world with bunch of websites catering similar kind of services, one very recent one is CrowdSpring a platform for creative people to offer their services.

creADivity is a first of its kind platform atleast in India to bring the enterprises and creatives at same forum and produce an environment of competitiveness. Unlike most other creative/advertising platforms like Behance etc where the enterprises and creatives handshake happens based on bidding (pricing) and portfolio based screening, creADivity brings a unique advantage of competitions for selection thereby removing any chances of customer dissatisfaction or plagiarism. Also it aims to become an engine for an end to end advertising & creative service provider unlike most others who fill in one or two blocks of the entire chain.

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