ApnaCircle's Spam-o-Maina

Long ago I read a review on some blog that Sabeer Bhatia started a Linked-In clone for India called ApnaCircle. Since I know Linked-In's popularity in the US, I got excited of Apnacircle's prospects here in India and joined it.

Whenever I join or register on a new website I don't give out my primary email address. However, noting the fact that this venture was started off by Sabeer I thought that the website will be pretty professional and would respect people's privacy and follow stringent anti-spam policies. So, I registered over there with my primary email address.

After joining in I noticed that there were not so many people out there on the website and decided to give it some time to mature and market itself. With Linked-In's backdrop behind my head I was pretty sure that this venture would go somewhere because this was one untapped market. The need for personal social networking was filled by Orkut so what remained was professional social networking. Thats where I though ApnaCircle will fit in.

All said and done within a month I started getting emails from folks on ApnaCircle who were interesting in Dating! let alone professional networking! The women who sent out dating invitations often had Russian names like Svetlana and Maria. This was pretty surprising to me. The admins at ApnaCircle seemed not to notice this at all.

Later after another couple of months I got invitation from ApnaCircle itself for checking out their new news section which also focused on local news by the city you lived in !

I thought ApnaCircle was started for Professional Social Networking ! What the hell happened to that? They've gone into news and spam dating invites ! Crap ....I've now signed out of that shit good for nothing social network. I've also insructed GMail to categorize ApnaCircle mails as SPAM!

I think Sabeer really doesn't have any talent to start and run online businesses at all. With Hotmail I guess he fell at the right place at the right time and got lucky. All this later ventures like Arzoo, The online office thing and this ApnaCircle have gone to the dumps.

Conclusion: The Professional Social Netoworking space in India is still open and is up for grabs for anybody who has moolah for advertising.