haath se nahi jaana chahiye is what a lot of guys seem to be thinking about social networking. During a movie interval, I happened to see an ad which asked me to go to Bangalore’s very own social networking site – moqqa.com. While the communication still lost out to Bipasha Basu (i didn’t leave the movie halfway to have a look) it did make me curious to figure out if they actually made a site only for Bangalore. Nah, it was only a communication gimmick designed perhaps to elicit exactly that kind of reaction.
I haven’t actually registered because it seems to concentrate on areas in which my interest is minimal. From the cover it looks to me like an ‘activity based’ SNS, because immediately after the (yes we all know that by now) make friends, its ‘what you can do’ covers MotorBiking, Trekking, River Rafting, Jeep Safari, Beach Volleyball, Weekend Football, Skiing, Snowboarding, Shopping, Partying etc. It also plugs sharing of creative ideas eg. Ad Ideas for Products like Colas, Jeans, Mobile Phones etc, 2D-3D-Flash Animation, Bike & Car Designs, Biz Ideas, Fashion Design, Movie Scripts, Song Lyrics etc. While a Facebook or an Orkut does have groups which do all or at least most of the above, an entire SN platform based on adventure sports/creative designing etc is definitely intriguing. Before we go further, other features include a chat platform (Talky), info emails (which would let you know about fashion, cool gadgets, Discounts & Sales etc), a public chat platform called Zap, music, blogs, videos, photo sharing, and a displaying of people who visited your profile. Overall, it seems more like a niche version of Orkut.
While focusing on specific interests is an intriguing proposition, I am not sure if the mix of adventure sports+ shopping+ creative designing makes sense. Maybe the idea is to broaden the base. In any case, I feel, to make it work will require a lot of activity from the makers of the portal outside the web. These will have to be local efforts which can then be later scaled up. For example, tie ups with holiday service providers who give adventure sports packages, efforts to make this a one stop shop for knowing about discounts (there are enough niche players in this already), corporate tournaments in say, weekend football and so on…
The creative designing itself spans a lot of territories, each of which require customised efforts – design contests in association with local ad clubs, bike car, fashion designs to be integrated with auto/fashion expos, and bollywood (since they’ve anyway started an SN site, they could adopt the other cliche too – reality shows for movie scripts and movie song lyrics).
So while I’m still wondering about its physical geographical location, it’ll be interesting to see whether they manage to brand themselves as a unique SNS or will fall by the wayside as yet another wannabe.
until next time, is there some numerology in the name (qq being a succesful chinese SNS) 😉