Move over Facebook and Orkut. There is a new Indian kid on the block. Kid because it's only two weeks old today with a registered user base of 1,500. And it is a new networking product with a fresh Indian twist.
Started by three young entrepreneurs, Ankur Gattani, Maninder Gulati and Nirjhareswar Bannerjee, Lifeinlines.com is a life streaming Web site -- unlike social networking sites; and that's what the twist is all about -- that allows users to post messages, pictures and videos as and when they are composed or clicked. And also first of its kind voice recording to the web via a phone call.
If you have captured an event on your mobile phone at five in the evening, you can post the picture or the video immediately on your Lifeinlines.com account and those who have access to your account can also view it.
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Says Ankur, an IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta product, about the uniqueness of LiL, as Lifeinlines.com is called: "As you go about your day there are so many things that happen, ideas that crop up when you see something interesting. But most of these things will go uncaptured because by the time you reach home and try to recollect those moments and ideas and try to write a scrap or blog about it you will find yourself unable to do it. Although such moments form a very important part of your life -- as they make your day -- they get lost in our hectic life."
A chance meeting with Harpreet Grover, Ankur's senior from IIT Bombay, set the ball rolling for Lifeinlines.com. They met almost after a year after and and caught up on each other's news. Interestingly, both felt like total strangers because they had not kept up with each other. It struck Ankur then that a platform like Lifeinlines.com could help people like Harpreet and him keep in touch on a regular basis, know what was happening in each other's lives without actually talking or meeting.
While Ankur is 24, Maninder, who was Ankur's senior at IIT Bombay, is 28 and Nirjareswar, who works from Kolkata, is 33.
Ankur, who was very sure that he didn't want to work for somebody when he was in his second year at IIM Calcutta, started out working on creating Lifeinlines.com believing it could act as a platform to allow people to capture and chronicle such moments.
Unlike Ankur, Maninder left a hugely remunerative job with FMCG major ITC after working for five years and Nirjhareshwar owns his own web development company Apex Divisions out of Kolkata.
The youngest in the team Ankur, spoke with Prasanna D Zore about Lil, how it is different from social networking sites like Orkut or Facebook and how his Web site will make use of mobile phones to capture a user base of over one million people in just about a year's time.
The idea behind Lifeinlines.com
It's a chronicle of your life created as you live. The whole idea is to let people capture their thoughts and experiences as they happen.
Our Web site offers users multiple input channels -- SMS, MMS, instant messengers and e-mails -- to post their content. You can also capture a video or picture and send an MMS to your account on Lifeinlines.com.
Also, if you are an office-goer who has access to a desktop but no access to our Web site you can also mail your special moments captured as voice, picture or video, as an attachment and post it to your account.
If you have an instant messenger active -- like say Google's GTalk -- on your computer then you can even add Lifeinlines.com to your friend's list and whatever you post using your GTalk account is captured in your Lifeinlines.com account.
What would you call Lifeinlines.com as? Is it a social networking site?
We would like to call ourselves as a life streaming service. Lifeinlines.com empowers users to continuously upload their thoughts, ideas, special moments, and whatever happens in their lives which is worth sharing on a regular basis.
This might be opposite of social networking per se. What we have is multiple privacy structure which allows a user to allow or restrict access to her/ his content on Lifeinlines.com. While typical social networking sites like Orkut or Facebook does really well so far as you have to discover old contacts, friends and interact with them such activities are largely superficial because this might not happen on a regular basis with all your friends in your network.
While the whole idea of discovering old friends and meet new people took off well, now there is saturation because there is not more you can do over there leaving aside the applications that these Web sites have incorporated to engage users.
Lifeinlines.com as a platform enables a very intimate witnessing of your friends' lives (if they allow you access to their content on Lifeinlines.com; they have multiple privacy levels that allows or restricts users who could see your posts). If I am going through certain experiences and I am capturing them on an ongoing basis then even my friends will be able to witness the same through Lifeinlines.com.
What're your expansion plans?
While the growth of computers in India is quite slow thanks to the mobile phone revolution happening in India we plan to build a user base of at least one million people in one year's time. Most mobile handsets are GPRS enabled and that's what will help us grow fast and capture users' attention.
For instance, youth in India are very mobile savvy and comfortable with using the SMS and MMS services offered by various service providers. If we succeed in capturing even a fraction of this user base one million won't be a difficult figure to catch up with.
While the cost of sending such SMSes and MMSes will be operator-dependent there are many operators who allow 30 MMSes free per month. For people using GPRS on their mobile phones MMS should not be very expensive.
How will you make money from Lifeinlines.com?
At the moment our focus is on building the user base. Once we get a lot of users spending a lot of time on our Web site that's when we would be interested in getting advertisements on Lifeinlines.com.
Your advice to young entrepreneurs like yourself
It needs a lot of patience to see an idea getting converted into reality. It's important to talk to a lot of people about your idea, get their feedback on it; this will help you to clarify your own line of thoughts.
Don't go for an idea that lacks focus and you haven't thought through thoroughly.