Last week I got an email invitation to join a professional network site called www.6bridges.com (they have also booked, very thoughtfully, the domain www.sixbridges.com, apparently for people who are less numerically inclined).
But the problem was this: the invitation was not from a friend (as is the norm), but directly from the site. I guess it was sent to the alumni id of my B-school. It kind of pisses me off when people think they can spam the alumni group email id. I thought I would take a look and see what this site is all about. (I could have simply deleted that mail; but that wouldn’t have made a very interesting read on the blog, would it? I mean “I got a spam mail and deleted it” hardly makes the blog readers to sit up and take notice.)
Now, why the name “6 bridges”? The invitation mail mentioned this
The name ‘6bridges' is derived from the fascinating concept of six degrees of separation between people, which the site aims to bridge.
Fair enough. Then I took a look at the site logo, which mentions this
6bridges.com . Building bridges to your future
Now I’m a bit confused. So is it the bridge between people or bridge between one individual and his future? I decided to check out the “About us” page (this is always the first thing I do while reviewing any site). The page mentions the idea of “6 bridges” in following different lines
If the theory about 6 degrees separating people is an interesting one, just what would you call the reality that brings 6 professionals together, whose interests and callings are more degrees apart than 6 !
We decided to call it 6bridges. Bridges that connected the 6 degrees of separation between people, their ideas, interests, paths and helped them to their desired destination.
6 degrees gave us 6 bridges, which in turn gave us these 6 topics.
After reading these lines, I just had 6 words for the founders, viz. “What a truck load of crap”. I wonder if they know what the concept of 6 degrees of separation is all about or just tried to use the number “6” and the word “bridge” in as many different ways as possible.
Interestingly, this site is only limited for alumni of certain pre-determined “elite” colleges (I’ll come back to this point later). My point is, after bragging about bridging the 6 degrees of separation, they have limited their user base to people who are perhaps separated, at the maximum, by two degrees. Anyway, enough bashing for the name, lets move on.
Next page that I checked, since I already knew about their spamming tendency, is the “privacy policy” page. For some reason they have decided to club it together with “terms and conditions” page. Compare this page with that of other professional networking sites; such as Linkedin or even the Indian players like Brijj or Techtribe; and you’ll understand how important “privacy” for 6bridges is.
Now coming back to the idea of limiting the site to only the “elite” colleges. Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my linkedin contact list and selected the top 30 most valuable contacts. Out of those 30, only 7 were from these elite colleges, i.e. more than 75% of my valuable contacts never went to these colleges. 6bridges is clearly designed for the headhunters, not for users like me whose idea of networking is to connect with valuable professionals.
I decided to register with them (with no intention whatsoever of using it in future) and got the confirmation mail after around 14 hours. I guess it’s the time they take to verify whether you actually belong to one of those colleges; a feature which I’m sure would please the headhunters.
When I logged in, I was completely lost. The page was completely cluttered and confusing, just like the home page. Also it seems the site was never tested for firefox users. Some of the dropdown menus, images and page layouts are messed up (I think the page layout problem is there for IE as well). There was no instruction for the new users about how they should start networking with others.
The invitation mail that I received had links to bunch of career related articles, which kind of looked tempting. But once I had registered and viewed those articles, I realized how useless the content was (I should have expected this). The content was mostly copied from several online sources (they were honest enough to provide the link to the original source) and was not organized properly. Some of the articles; such as “Salary Negotiation – Tips and Strategies”, make you wonder who the target audiences are; since any “professional” would find this information useless.
6bridges looks more like a job site, rather than a networking site. But I think they are missing the point. The idea of combining professional networking with head hunting is to identify the passive job seekers and to help get candidates through referrals. I’m not sure how a site designed with keeping only the headhunters in mind and ignoring the networking aspect is ever going to achieve that. As far as I’m concerned, this is one bridge I’m unlikely to cross.
Showing posts with label product reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label product reviews. Show all posts
Monday, September 10, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Brijjes and Tribes
In the past, I’ve written about how it’s difficult for the new players in the social networking market place to “steal” users from the incumbents. So out of curiosity I decided to check out how the one month old Brijj is doing in the market.
In the absence of any other reliable source, I turned, a bit reluctantly, to Alexa. Some of us, who have been keeping track of Alexa rankings for different sites, usually view these stats with the same degree of skepticism typically reserved for things like Saurabh Ganguly’s call for a quick single or Munaf Patel’s declaration that he is completely match fit; i.e. things that have let you down in the past.
The Alexa traffic graphs for Brijj showed that there was an initial peak and after that it followed a downward slope (This is obviously along the expected lines). But, of course these graphs in isolation didn’t make any sense. I thought it would be more interesting to compare the graphs of Brijj with those of the other players in the market.
A direct competitor for Brijj is techtribe; both are professional network sites targeted specifically to the Indian audience. Techtribe is in market for over a year now; so I expected it to have a greater reach and higher page views than Brijj. But I was in for a surprise. The Alexa graphs showed that Brijj has almost 4-6 times more reach and 3-8 times more page views. Techtribe is ranked 2045 in India; as opposed to Brijj which has a very impressive rank of 371.
Now, I’m not in a position to do a feature by feature comparison of the two sites. I’ve never used techtribe and the time I’ve spent in Brijj would make a typical Sehwag innings look longer. But on the face of it, techtribe looks more content reach (and understandably so). Techtribe has communities, knowledge sections, job postings and so on, which are as of now not present in Brijj. So the question obviously is how Brijj managed to generate so many page views. Is it due to the marketing efforts put in by Infoedge? Is it due to the naukri brand name? Is it due to the fact that Infoedge had a much larger employee base to start the word-of-mouth campaign (seems like a trivial point, but some of my “sources” have told me that Orkut was launched that way)?
I think it’s just a matter of when and not if Brijj would introduce features like job referrals, communities, answers etc. It would be interesting then to see if Brijj can challenge the bigger players like linkedin.
[For some reason the Alexa webservices are not returning any result. I thought of using their widgets to put the graphs directly in the blog, but in stead of the graph I only got a blank space. If you know what's the issue, please let me know]
In the absence of any other reliable source, I turned, a bit reluctantly, to Alexa. Some of us, who have been keeping track of Alexa rankings for different sites, usually view these stats with the same degree of skepticism typically reserved for things like Saurabh Ganguly’s call for a quick single or Munaf Patel’s declaration that he is completely match fit; i.e. things that have let you down in the past.
The Alexa traffic graphs for Brijj showed that there was an initial peak and after that it followed a downward slope (This is obviously along the expected lines). But, of course these graphs in isolation didn’t make any sense. I thought it would be more interesting to compare the graphs of Brijj with those of the other players in the market.
A direct competitor for Brijj is techtribe; both are professional network sites targeted specifically to the Indian audience. Techtribe is in market for over a year now; so I expected it to have a greater reach and higher page views than Brijj. But I was in for a surprise. The Alexa graphs showed that Brijj has almost 4-6 times more reach and 3-8 times more page views. Techtribe is ranked 2045 in India; as opposed to Brijj which has a very impressive rank of 371.
Now, I’m not in a position to do a feature by feature comparison of the two sites. I’ve never used techtribe and the time I’ve spent in Brijj would make a typical Sehwag innings look longer. But on the face of it, techtribe looks more content reach (and understandably so). Techtribe has communities, knowledge sections, job postings and so on, which are as of now not present in Brijj. So the question obviously is how Brijj managed to generate so many page views. Is it due to the marketing efforts put in by Infoedge? Is it due to the naukri brand name? Is it due to the fact that Infoedge had a much larger employee base to start the word-of-mouth campaign (seems like a trivial point, but some of my “sources” have told me that Orkut was launched that way)?
I think it’s just a matter of when and not if Brijj would introduce features like job referrals, communities, answers etc. It would be interesting then to see if Brijj can challenge the bigger players like linkedin.
[For some reason the Alexa webservices are not returning any result. I thought of using their widgets to put the graphs directly in the blog, but in stead of the graph I only got a blank space. If you know what's the issue, please let me know]
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Cross the Brijj only when you come to it
[This post is partly a review of the new professional networking site Brijj; and partly (or rather, I should say, mostly) a response to another review “A brijj too far” by Shyam.
I must clarify upfront that my views may not be considered completely unbiased. I’ve worked at Infoedge in the past, so might have developed a soft corner for the team. I’ll try to keep these personal biases out of the post]
Let’s start with Shyam’s review “A brijj too far”. Once we have ignored the first three paragraphs, which tell you how Indian firms are only good at copying stuff from the west and how only the developers’ lovers use their product, we reach the point where the author starts the review of Brijj. The most admirable part of the review is the discovery of the redundant Meta tags and the invisible div tag. Hats off to Shyam for discovering these things, which have supposedly escaped the notice of the QA team. But my question is how do these things affect the user? May be I’m an exception, but when I’m surfing the net I hardly ever go through the source code of each page to check the meta tags. So what Shyam is trying to tell us is that the code is not polished. Big Deal! Isn’t that what you would expect from a beta version? When the time to market is so important I would much rather have my technical team and QA team focus on product features than spending their time in refining the code.
Next, Shyam complains about the absence of privacy settings for the users. Interestingly, even LinkedIn doesn’t have such a setting (some of the granular settings were added much later; for features such as your public profile or Q&A section; features which are so far not present in Brijj). So the only “privacy” setting that is present in linkedin and missing in Brijj is whether you allow others to see your contact list or not. I’m sure the team must be having this on their priority list. But as far as privacy is concerned I think Brijj does a much better job than the personal networking sites like orkut, myspace etc. Just like LinkedIn, it tries to handle most of the privacy and spam issues by itself rather than asking users to specify these settings.
Then Shyam talks about Infoedge’s “critical mistakes like not having a common registration database among its properties”. Mind you this line comes from a guy who was just complaining about privacy. The point Shyam is missing is having a common user database is actually more beneficial to the company than the users. Most of the times it’s the user who doesn’t want to have his data aggregated. In any case, I don’t think it makes sense for the products Infoedge has; 99acres hardly requires a registration, most of the users would use jeevan saathi for a very short time (at least I hope they would), and in naukri although there is a repeat usage, the frequency won’t be very high.
My favorite line in the entire post is: “I am assuming that at some point Info Edge will roll into Brijj, the muscle of Naukri’s database, but they have again erred gravely by not having it on from day one”. Networking is a social activity and job searching is mostly a private activity (by this I mean most of us don’t want to broadcast the fact that we are looking for a job switch, we might contact some selected people for this). And what naukri database is Shyam talking about? If he is referring to database of resumes and candidates; I’m not sure how that can be merged with Brijj. Invite all the naukri candidates to Brijj? They might as well send a mail to my HR manager and my boss saying that I’m looking for a job change. And if Shyam is talking about the database of job postings, that I’m sure would come much later in Brijj, but in a different form. Brijj would help companies identify candidates mostly through referrals (that’s the benefit of networking, isn’t it?).
So what’s my verdict on Brijj. I think it’s way too early to write a review for the product. The true value of a networking site can only be gauged when it has gained a substantial user base (“positive network externality” guys, remember I talked about this here?).
Brijj definitely has some cool features to start with. The UI looks pretty decent (I generally don’t care much for UIs, but it matters to most). They provide a type-ahead functionality for company names and educational institute names. The importance of this type-ahead functionality would be clear when you look at the “People you may know” section in home page. Allow me to explain. Even linkedin has a “people you may know” section, which tries to match the company name/ institute name to find your ex-colleagues and alumni. But linkedin misses a lot of potential contacts because the company name is entered in a free text field. If user A enters his company as “Infoedge” and user B enters it as “Infoedge India Pvt. Ltd”; chances are linkedin won’t recognize them as colleagues. This problem would be addressed in Brijj to a great extent, since most users would select the name from the type-ahead list.
I’m sure what we are seeing is a skeleton version of what’s planned for the site. Not because the team accidentally missed implementing those features; but because most of these features only make sense when you have build a large enough user base. So let’s give Brijj sometime before we give our verdict.
I must clarify upfront that my views may not be considered completely unbiased. I’ve worked at Infoedge in the past, so might have developed a soft corner for the team. I’ll try to keep these personal biases out of the post]
Let’s start with Shyam’s review “A brijj too far”. Once we have ignored the first three paragraphs, which tell you how Indian firms are only good at copying stuff from the west and how only the developers’ lovers use their product, we reach the point where the author starts the review of Brijj. The most admirable part of the review is the discovery of the redundant Meta tags and the invisible div tag. Hats off to Shyam for discovering these things, which have supposedly escaped the notice of the QA team. But my question is how do these things affect the user? May be I’m an exception, but when I’m surfing the net I hardly ever go through the source code of each page to check the meta tags. So what Shyam is trying to tell us is that the code is not polished. Big Deal! Isn’t that what you would expect from a beta version? When the time to market is so important I would much rather have my technical team and QA team focus on product features than spending their time in refining the code.
Next, Shyam complains about the absence of privacy settings for the users. Interestingly, even LinkedIn doesn’t have such a setting (some of the granular settings were added much later; for features such as your public profile or Q&A section; features which are so far not present in Brijj). So the only “privacy” setting that is present in linkedin and missing in Brijj is whether you allow others to see your contact list or not. I’m sure the team must be having this on their priority list. But as far as privacy is concerned I think Brijj does a much better job than the personal networking sites like orkut, myspace etc. Just like LinkedIn, it tries to handle most of the privacy and spam issues by itself rather than asking users to specify these settings.
Then Shyam talks about Infoedge’s “critical mistakes like not having a common registration database among its properties”. Mind you this line comes from a guy who was just complaining about privacy. The point Shyam is missing is having a common user database is actually more beneficial to the company than the users. Most of the times it’s the user who doesn’t want to have his data aggregated. In any case, I don’t think it makes sense for the products Infoedge has; 99acres hardly requires a registration, most of the users would use jeevan saathi for a very short time (at least I hope they would), and in naukri although there is a repeat usage, the frequency won’t be very high.
My favorite line in the entire post is: “I am assuming that at some point Info Edge will roll into Brijj, the muscle of Naukri’s database, but they have again erred gravely by not having it on from day one”. Networking is a social activity and job searching is mostly a private activity (by this I mean most of us don’t want to broadcast the fact that we are looking for a job switch, we might contact some selected people for this). And what naukri database is Shyam talking about? If he is referring to database of resumes and candidates; I’m not sure how that can be merged with Brijj. Invite all the naukri candidates to Brijj? They might as well send a mail to my HR manager and my boss saying that I’m looking for a job change. And if Shyam is talking about the database of job postings, that I’m sure would come much later in Brijj, but in a different form. Brijj would help companies identify candidates mostly through referrals (that’s the benefit of networking, isn’t it?).
So what’s my verdict on Brijj. I think it’s way too early to write a review for the product. The true value of a networking site can only be gauged when it has gained a substantial user base (“positive network externality” guys, remember I talked about this here?).
Brijj definitely has some cool features to start with. The UI looks pretty decent (I generally don’t care much for UIs, but it matters to most). They provide a type-ahead functionality for company names and educational institute names. The importance of this type-ahead functionality would be clear when you look at the “People you may know” section in home page. Allow me to explain. Even linkedin has a “people you may know” section, which tries to match the company name/ institute name to find your ex-colleagues and alumni. But linkedin misses a lot of potential contacts because the company name is entered in a free text field. If user A enters his company as “Infoedge” and user B enters it as “Infoedge India Pvt. Ltd”; chances are linkedin won’t recognize them as colleagues. This problem would be addressed in Brijj to a great extent, since most users would select the name from the type-ahead list.
I’m sure what we are seeing is a skeleton version of what’s planned for the site. Not because the team accidentally missed implementing those features; but because most of these features only make sense when you have build a large enough user base. So let’s give Brijj sometime before we give our verdict.
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