Batchmates was recently recognized as the ‘Largest Cyber Alumni Platform’ by the Limca Book of Records. They claim a database of more than two million alumni from 204,300 schools and colleges. The site also claims that approximately 2,000 new alumni join it every day.

But how significant is that?
I would say even 2,000 alumni per day is a pretty small number. With nearly 8 Lakh+ Indians registering in Social Networking sites each month (and I would assume each would be an alumni/student of some or the other school/college), it shows that perhaps Batchmates.com should incorporate a more dynamic social-networking platform which would aid in communication and connect – the 2 major C’s of a Alumni Network.

We’ve been studying ‘community’ participation and here’s an interesting statistic:
The first community anyone joins in Orkut - 7 out of 10 times is that of ones School or College.

Local players have realized this, with DesiMartini automatically slotting you into communities of the college / school you mention during the registration procedure. Even MingleBox is trying hard to push its Campus element.

Internationally Reunion.com is doing rather well.

Quoting from TechCrunch:

"A social network for reconnecting with old friends and family, just grabbed a huge $25 million round of funding from Oak Investment Partners to join their original $1.4 million in angel financing (Richard Rosenblatt was one angel). The service is kind of like Classmates.com, but for branded as a way to reconnect with anyone you haven’t seen in a while.

Reunion makes it easy to register your data into the system through a registration process that just requires a full name, birth date, and email address. Once you register you can continue on to a free profile or get a premium account ($3.34/one month, $60/year). The free account gives you the standard social networking profile features, while the premium account throws in some extra features.

One can wonder how a service like this could charge in the face of network behemoths Facebook, LinkedIn, and Myspace, but Reunion makes it easy to collect basic data that can be used to lure other users into the network, and searches through a lot of personal data points.
Their strategy seems to be around getting as many people as possible to add their basic info into the database and then luring other users into the network by telling them how many people might be searching for them.

According to the company, the site has attracted 28 million users and is adding nearly one million new members each month. They draw almost 8 million unique visitors conducting 60 million searches for people monthly."

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