Yaari.Com brings mobile social networking to India

New Delhi, Nov 8 (UNI) A recently launched social networking site for Indian youth, has released the country's first platform for mobile social networking.

Yaari.com co-founder and CEO Prerna Gupta says the benefit of integrating a social networking site with mobile phones is that ''it keeps users connected to their network of friends from anywhere, which is especially relevant in India where people do not always have continuous Internet access.'' The product, Yaari Mobile, release included two primary features -- Ywords and Ychat.

Ywords allowed users to browse the network and interact with other individuals on the site using simple SMS functionality. For example, if a Yaari member sends an SMS command 'Y profile prerna gupta' to Yaari, she would receive Prerna's profile information in the form of an SMS on her phone.

She could then go on to browse Prerna's friends in the same manner, and also send them 'pinches', a unique way of interacting with other Yaars.

The other feature, Ychat, used SMS to enable group chatting on the go. Users log in to Yaari.com in order to create their Ychat groups and invite their friends to join. Once the group was in place, members could join group discussions via their mobiles and broadcast messages to every person in the group with a single SMS.

They could also reply to messages sent by other members, both from their mobiles and online. Members could join or leave the discussion at anytime, with simple 'in' and 'out' commands. ''It's like a mobile chat room,'' Prerna said and added that ''because you can sign in and out of the discussion whenever you want. Another really cool aspect is that you can send free SMS's to entire groups of people by logging in to Yaari.com, or you can message multiple people from your phone but only be charged for a single SMS.'' Yaari.com also planned to introduce non-SMS based mobile features, such as photo and video upload, in the near future. Prerna was optimistic about the opportunity for an Indian mobile social network to gain widespread adoption.

''There are 25 million active Internet users in India. While this figure is large and growing rapidly, it is just the tip of the iceberg. With over 100 million mobile phone users, more than half of which are youth, India is ripe for a mobile social network,'' she said further.

Yaari was an invitation-based social network for Indians. The site was launched in September 2006 by two American-born Indians, Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia, who recently graduated from Stanford University.

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