Category Archives: kwippy

kwippy nominated for TATA NEN’s hottest startup awards

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TATA along with NEN have started a competition for India’s hottest startup. TATA is one of the biggest and most respected companies of India and for the uninitiated NEN( National Entrepreneurship Network) is a non-profit organization, and India’s leader in entrepreneurship education. The nominations for the contest are open till 22nd October 08 and 30 shortlisted startups will be announced on 6th Nov 08 which will again be open for public votes and five winners would be announced on 23rd December 08 { Yes, it’s far 🙂 }.

Even before we got to know of these awards in detail somebody told us that Kwippy has been nominated. Thanks a lot to those who nominated kwippy. Its been a few days since kwippy started showing up on the awards website but amid the hussle n bussle of action on kwippy it kinda slipped our minds. It was when I logged in to the awards site to see if we’ve got any votes I found that not only we’ve got some 20 votes without us really doing anything to make people aware also that we are ranked 47(not bad I’d say). Given the fact that there’s quite some time left and we can let people know about this, am sure kwippy can do much much better.

If you’ve liked kwippy even a bit or you’ve know anyone from the team please go ahead and vote for kwippy 🙂

To vote click HERE

Or type HOT<space>106 and sms to 56767

Delhi bloggers meetup/tweetup

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Delhi’s second tweetup/bloggers meet happened on Saturday evening at Incube’s nehru place office and I was one of the speakers. Like last time’s meetup at C.P It was organized by the Delhi bloggers bloc with Priyanka aka Twilight Fairy co-ordinating the event. The last such event I attended was the social media camp/meet that happened a couple of months back in Gurgaon.

It was good to meet friends and people whom I had just known by their online identities. The event was nicely coordinated and managed to attract 30-35 attendees mostly bloggers/microbloggers. The audience was a mix of beginners and intermediary level social media enthusiasts. Gautam Ghosh started the event with a discussion on Twitter & its various uses. It was a free flowing discussion and he nicely touched various aspects of twitter and its tools amongst other things. After Gautam it was my turn to talk about kwippy.

The talk that I gave had two parts, the first being  “WTF is kwippy”. Taking forward some of the points that were discussed in the previous talk I discussed the following
what exactly is kwippy,  how it started as a status message aggregator, how we are handling conversations, people behind kwippy and kwippy’s community.
It took a while for people to get in sync with all that was being said but the demo of the app helped in putting things into context much better and easier. I picked up one of the ongoing conversations on kwippy started by thepete to show a sample conversation and how conversations on kwippy can stay active for days.

Second part of the talk was on how kwippy is different from twitter. On hindsight I should not have made this comparison and got the topic changed because when we talk about conversations there’s nothing common between the two as compared in a previous post here. No offense but I’ve always wondered how come people who’ve been using twitter for long don’t really get what @reply there means. Every time I tell people @ links to that person’s last reply and not the tweet you replied it for, they seem to simply refuse to admit it first and get perplexed. It was good to see people asking all sorts of questions ranging from the technology behind kwippy to the holy grail of social media sites aka monetization.

The next discussion was by Priyanka about copyright issues and her recent experience(not so nice) TOI believes flickr is for flicking and am sure It would have raised some awareness amongst the attendees and maybe left a few wishing for a similar experience to earn some extra buck 🙂

The last topic of the event was on bill of rights by Kumar Rahul. It was another interesting discussion which raised some important questions about user rights on web.

I enjoyed the event throughly and it was worth an hour n a half’s drive from my place.

Thanks Vimoh for the pics 🙂

Conversations, who’s doing what?

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“Social Media is people having conversations online” – Marta Z Kagan.

This in my opinion is the most simple yet apt definition of social media that can ever be. Once you start connecting the dots you’ll realize that’s indeed what social media is all about. Be it the latest craze aka microblogging sites, conversational tool/services, social-networking sites or any other media sharing site. While the social objects may differ from service to service the end goal for most is to get people talking/commenting around those objects. Since humans are by nature social and love talking/discussing/debating conversations are the ultimate hooks for a site and if done rightly can do wonders to a site’s engagement.

Wait for a second and think what was your last activity on your favorite site ? Mine was commenting on a comment someone made at a friend’s facebook status. Facebook does a great job in providing these hooks to let people have conversations. It started off with a simple wall, then it was user uploaded images/videos and now its status messages. Comment chains on people’s status messages is getting common by the day. According to me any site that needs to grow and be successful needs to handle conversations extremely well and give it all it takes.

Here’s a brief comparison of how some sites that I’ve used/still use handle conversations.

[TABLE=4]

Each of these features/attributes play an important part in the conversation game. People might not realize it consciously but these features/attributes help in forming hooks that keep people engaged to conversations and in effect increase site’s stickiness.

Threaded Conversations make it extremely easy to keep track of comments/replies around an object.

Parallel Conversations is a purely online experience. Unlike real life with the context switching issue you can online have parallel(almost) conversations with someone or a group on different topics. What it means is that its really difficult offline to have conversations with someone on two-three different topics simultaneously/parallely for long but its far easier online(in some services).

No Character Limit lets people express their views/thoughts without any restriction thus enabling proper discussions/debates.

Follow up Notifications lets people stay in touch with conversations they like which in effect means that people are always connected to a conversation and any activity even weeks/months of inactivity can infuse life again. Conversations are now immortal.

Invite People to a conversation lets people invite other people to begin/join a conversation. It helps in the free flow of conversations across the site and making them VIRAL.

Comment Feed lets you own not only the comments on your objects but also on other people’s objects. You can know take your comments and use them the way you want.

We at kwippy have added a new dimension to the equation by introducing the “Invite people to join/begin a conversation feature” to make the conversation mix more engaging.  How have your experiences been with on-site conversations ? What do you think can make conversations more sticky ?