Can you tell us something about ibibo.com?
Ibibo.com is a local social utility that enables you to discover new people. There are numerous local social utilities available on ibibo that drive creation, collaboration, and discovery of new people. Ibibo.com has crafted these social utilities into the social graph. It is this combination of local utilities and discovery of new people that creates the core differentiation for ibibo.com.

There are numerous other local social utilities available on ibibo.com that further catalyze discovery of people. Some include tools such as Call for Free enables users to speak to each other over their mobiles for free and that too without the need for sharing their mobile numbers. Games on ibibo.com further add to the dimension and enhance the context of making new friends.

What makes ibibo.com different from a number of social networking portals like Facebook, Orkut and the likes?
Ibibo.com enables you to create a new social graph. In other words, it enables you to discover new people and friends. This is unlike other sites that help you connect with your offline social connections. Young population, especially from mid-tier and small cities and towns in India, have a big need to create new social connections driven by the fact that they do not have very strong offline networks. Ibibo meets this need by providing a platform where they can create their virtual persona.

Ashish Kashyap, CEO, ibibo Web

The second key differentiator of ibibo.com is the presence of numerous utilitarian tools within the social network that drive a context for making new friends. Social classifieds and social search services such as Sawaal within the social network is a strong paradigm for this differentiator. We believe that utilitarian needs need to marry emotional needs to make it meaningful for users.

Do you think social networking portals have been able to move beyond the usual friends reconnect to networking?
Ibibo.com is a great paradigm of social networking moving beyond the usual friends reconnects kind of thing. On ibibo.com, Indian youth are enabled to discover new friends and create a new social graph. The other key trend being projected by us is the movement to niche and interest-based social networks from the usual ones. Ibibo Networks another service-onefamily.com-is a first of its kind initiative in India that enables extended families to connect and collaboratively manage their family network.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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