Facebook or Orkut?

social

I was mulling over Alexa this weekend, when I decided to compare the web traffics of the three networking sites; facebook, myspace and orkut. The annual traffic graph revealed an interesting picture I must say. The myspace traffic is more or less constant with its brief set of fluctuations, Fox Interactive Media should be a happy puppy. Their market share has remained solid,whew!!

But look at orkut and facebook, facebook (in red) has been steadily growing from milestone to milestone, and recently was crowned as the top social network site on the blue nothing (that’s the internet). The sudden spurt you see in all the curves, I think its the announcement of Facebook, when they announced their predator safegaurds. Remember that time in May, when a youth in India was kidnapped by some strangers through orkut? Well, could that explain the sudden dip in orkut traffic?

Strangely, during that time, orkut went the facebook way by having a few orkut apps, could this culture shift have thrown more traffic towards facebook?

I know a lot of people have not put too much thought into social communities, et al, but community management and monetization of the same is the only revenue models for both orkut and facebook. I wonder whether the orkut product manager is breaking a sweat on this? Incidentally, the orkut development and engineering team has shifted entirely to Brazil, where it is the no. 1 social networking site.

Addendum

I don’t know how he came across this blog, but Gaurav Dua gave a very logical explanation for the sudden dip in the traffic. If you see the Orkut url, then for Indian users it is nowadays orkut.co.in, same for Brazil, hence the traffic figures have dropped to 33% (approx.). I feel like such a dunderhead :-)

Technology Hype Cycle

gartner-hype-cycle1

For the uninitiated, please read more dope on the Hype Cycle.

Just came across this diagram, I thought that I might share this with you :)

What I would like to highlight here is that, Web 2.0 is going to go for mainstream adoption within the next 2 years (assuming that Gartner has done their homework), and it is about to hit the Trough of Disillusionment.

Are we to see another dotcom bust?

PS – Advice for freshers about to choose their careers, go towards ERP, EAI, BI side … or towards storage and hardware side.

Customer Loyalty

I was coming back from Mumbai via Indian Airlines (now known as Air India). As you would have it, the flight was delayed by 90 minutes … the passengers were sitting in the flight without the airplane moving a single inch. Finally, when the flight reached Hyderabad, I took a cab to office, half the day was wasted … hrrrumph!!

On my way to the office, I receive a call from an Air India representative, saying that 4 air miles have been accrued to my account and I can check those at so and so url, all I need to do is keep my boarding passes with me. Just how idiotic is this … for travelling 1600 miles, I get 4 air miles … so after 400 trips with Air India, I will finally get one flight free of cost. That’s a discount of 0.25%

If only they can take that discount and use the savings to bolster their infrastructure and setup so that such flight delays do not occur. I would rather pay that discount instead of waiting those additional 90 minutes. Does the marketing department of Air India have a warped definition of customer loyalty?

Enthusiasm v/s Experience

What would you reward more in your firm? Often, in a start-up, you need that zeal, that spirit, that enthusiasm to get things going. To overcome the inertia of normal living, to overcome the difficulties that would falter any one … to get the thing done. My sales team is full of young and enthusiastic fellows.

We recently hired a new director to head one of the SBU’s of the firm. Jolly Jose has a mountain of experience behind him, is persistent and dedicated to the job, knows enough tricks and tips of the trade to get those things done. His experience offers him insights that we normally miss out on. My technology team started out young, but now is a mix of veterans and enthusiastic people, I favor the experienced guys myself, since I know that when the cookie crumbles, it is the battle hardened veterans who will keep their cool and carry the ship through past seen stormy waters.

So what do you think? Enthusiasm or Experience?

Corporate Blog

I like the blogger.com blog which comes when you hit blogger.com (its below the login form). Especially this post about babes at blogger. Gives the firm that personalization touch, dont you think? As it is, it is way more interesting than Google Blog :-)

It’s kind of difficult to have a corporate blog that readers come repeatedly to. Generally, if you are a well known firm like Google, HP, IBM, Accenture, et al, then having a blog makes good sense. What we see though is that people use blogs to make their companies famous!! I should not call those people fools since we were about to be one of them, when we thought other wise. Having a blog is good, but it should act as a PR tool and not as a marketing tool.

Direct from Dell (to Hell)

No its not a complete, “I hate Dell” post.

I was the student representative for IIM Indore, in handling all the IT problems. I loved it, and liked fixing the varied problems that my classmates, juniors and seniors had. Back then, we had a tie up with Dell for laptops. Roughly at any point of time, at least 70 laptops were there from Dell. The warranty on them had lapsed in a years’ time, so … as Murphy would have it, the problems started cropping up only after then. Thus started the telephone calls over Warranty issues, and the constant bartering … over warranty given on paper … then comes the line, read the fine print. I was glad to hand over the ITCom Secretary post to my able junior .. whew!!

Now I do not own a Dell laptop anymore, but two of my colleagues do. Both have malfunctioning laptop batteries and chargers to boot, so the machine refuses to run without AC power and a functioning battery. Ok … easy solution … go to support dot dell dot com and raise a request. One month wait for customer care to respond. Fine, lets raise a sales enquiry of purchasing a new battery and a charger … one month wait for sales to respond. Is the site working anymore?

If you have a website and are making case studies of it in so many b-schools, then can you make sure it works properly; and if it is working properly, then why not respond to the customer, establishing their expectations. No response is a no-no. That has not only resulted in lost sales, but more importantly lost customers. An easier approach would be to sell extended warranty support to them and retain them as customers.

Quantity v/s Quality

Today Don and I tried out this new restaurant in Hyderabad, it seemed new; considering the fact that we had not noticed it earlier. Upon entering the restaurant at peak lunch hours, we saw that the place was like a graveyard … rows upon rows of empty seats. Thats not a very good sign, let me tell you at the outset.

We still decided to persist, it’s the never-say-never attitude combined with the kya-hi-farak-padta-hain attitude that pushed us. Prices were decent, we ordered our usual order … one meal and two rotis plus one more dish. This normally is enough for the two of us. Just about more than enough actually :-)

When the waiter came, he had his tray full with dishes … the quantity was huge .. big dishes and loads of dishes (what a meal!!!). It was enough for maybe 5 people, 6 even. The food quality was not that great, neither was the service … but pricing and quantity. Wow!

I wonder, what would have happened had the restaurateer focused on quality instead of quantity.