Indian Tech Blogs, OpenSocial and Some Humble Thoughts

No doubt that blogs are more about the individual’s or the group’s opinion and that any news posted on a blog need not necessarily be cross-checked like a journalist does. However, as we have observed, most of the prominent tech-bloggers outside of India, verify their facts and give it the time before they make any overly critical observations in their coverage.

If you look at the Indian Startup blogging community, the blogs I follow are contentsutra, pluggd.in and startupdunia.com among others. I follow them because I like to read their analysis and thoughts about Indian Startups. Recently, the trend of bashing any new ideas and any startup they come across has risen. One believes that these comments are being made without understanding the startup’s motive behind its actions and if it fits into the startup’s vision.

As an example, consider these blog entries on two of India’s widely followed blogs on internet and startups.

Here are the articles :

1.) MingleBox launches orkut Apps – Is Sleeping with Competition that bad? on pluggd.in
2.) WTF – MingleBox makes apps for orkut ? on Startupdunia.

Both articles talk about minglebox.com – an Indian campus oriented hangout place for teens and youth, launched apps for the Indian audience on orkut under Google’s OpenSocial platform.

As bloggers, each of them had different takes on this. No issues. These were posted just following the post on the official orkut blog showcasing the apps made by minglebox. Looks like no further information was looked for and a hasty post was up on the blogs. What made me think so?

If one were to go through the apps directory on orkut, they would have seen not two apps. A small check on the apps directory would have helped the readers get the correct information.

While pluggd.in perhaps got it right in terms of the value proposition for minglebox, Startupdunia, using very strong languages goes on to question on how orkut itself benefits from these apps – “If anyone can figure how orkut benefits from this (other than getting two additional apps into their fledgling app repository), can you kindly enlighten me ?“

What is OpenSocial? Briefly put, it’s a standard to make the web communities serve better to their users. Instead of developers writing different sets of APIs for different containers(social networks), OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
1.) Profile Information (user data)
2.) Friends Information (social graph)
3.) Activities (News Feeds, friends update)

To put things in a better perspective, concepts of Microformats and data portabality help us make better sense of Open Social.

These apps are for the containers under OpenSocial and not just orkut alone. And it helps the developers building these apps if these can be ported to other social networks with minimal effort. Maybe there’s some play in there for a company like minglebox. Let’s wait and watch, shall we?

While feedback, reviews and critical analysis are most welcome, especially for startups, one wonders if our bloggers and commentators are a little too skeptical of any new approach or initiative by startups? Isn’t it better if we let the new approaches and initiatives take some shape before being extremely critical of them? Just some humble thoughts from an observer of the the Indian internet and startup scene.

A lot of people, including myself, regularly follow news and reviews mentioned on these well-known blogs. It’d really help us if there is some background check and more thought put into the posts, as we more often than not, tend to take them at face value. And as someone closely associated to the web rightly said,

With great power comes great responsibility

We’ve watched this movie enough number of times, haven’t we?

Peace!