TV18 and its web arm web 18 among them have probably the largest portfolio of web properties than any other company can boast of. So along with yatra.com, cricketnext.com, compareindia.com, tech2.com, bookmyshow.com which launched recently. Now it seems Raghav Behl who heads TV18 has made a personal investment in Tangerine Digital which has launched Campus18.com. (Thanks Nikhil for the correction)

I have been hearing about campus18 from a few of my friends who are in college in mumbai and also about the fact that campus18 had recruited some students as campus representatives for their site. Though i first read about the site here.

Did Mr.Behl make the right investment?

First Impression on Campus18.com :

I thought the days when flash enabled homepages which took atleast 3 minutes to load were over.. But i was proved wrong when i visited Campus18.com. The homepage has a flash animation and a login and password option but the flash animation is so slow i could hang myself before logging in and it still woudnt have loaded :S.

Post Registration on Campus18.com :

Ok so even if i survived the slow homepage symptoms and manages to register oneself and logs into one’s account all of which is pretty decent. But once you are in your account its the same story.. Too slow. Too much use of flash which takes ages to load. I think these guys need to understand that jazzy User interface doesn’t translate into great Usability!!!

So what can you do on Campus 18 :

Cafe: Browse events & and contests and clubs. Also Chat hang out. 
Muzik: Connect with bands in the music club. Discuss music. 
Fotos: Display and discuss pictures.
My Room: A was to personalise your profile by choosing/creating your avatar and room (Very slow as flash used) 
Store: As the name suggests one can buy ringtones and other digital downloads.

While all the above features sound interesting from a usability perpective Campus18 is as painful as any site ive come across!! And i thought India was moving into the web 2.0 era.. :S

Also though this is a personal investment by Raghav Behl and not a TV18 initiative i doubt how long that will be the case. I suspect that campus18 would soon form a part of the web18 kitty as that what web 18 was formed for to handle all web portal businesses unless ofcourse Mr.Behl thinks that web18 doesn’t do such a great job with the web portal it runs.

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