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Dhingana.com - Doesn’t Make Us Scream & Shout With Joy
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We wrote about Dhingana way back in 2006 – they have just launched a spruced up version of their Social Network based on music.
They have the basic profile page, which gets updated automatically when you listen to some music. So for example if someone comes to your page, that person can see all the songs that you have listened to. Alternatively, from your profile you can also see what your friends are listening to. So it’s quite ‘social’ in that sense. When I tried it, they music streamed pretty fast as well. They have secured licenses for streaming music so I doubt any legal problems will arise (like the ones Minglebox apparently faced).
They also have playlists that can be created that are ‘diggable’ – so if you like a playlist, you digg it and famous playlists get featured in the public domain. They also have a Facebook kind of ‘What are you doing now?’ microblogging feature – a shameless ripoff I would say.
The one thing that’s severely lacking is probably the groups feature which is why they have to a ask members to join the Musical Community on Orkut (which by the way has only 1350 members – since February 2006)! I understand how this can be used as a strategy to migrate audiences from Orkut to Dhingana – but having a group for a social network on another social network is like disaster. It just shows that the network accepts that it is not sticky enough, and lacks a few features! Facebook has a group on Orkut too – but that’s user generated. This, I doubt is.
You can share Dhingana playlists across Social Media, which is probably a good thing. It ensures that users showcase this content across media – user generated visibility. They also have a 360 Widget that can be added to Blogs and Google Pages – but other have this too – Muziboo for example – (read our review of Muziboo). There is very little scope for user generated content on Dhingana, or so it seems, keeping in mind the network is laid out. It seems like they only want users to listen and share.
Fropper launched a Jukebox recently – Dhingana has some handy augmentations with Music that they can learn from.
Dhingana has also probably realised that only music won’t help in creating a rich experience – so they have added games and news that users can submit. Most of the games are sourced from third party sites.
The network, in my opinion has many of the ingredients for interactivity but it still lacks a lot – it can’t pack that final punch. The network can probably learn a lot from MySpace’s strategy and modify it for the Indian Context. If it stays this way, I doubt it will be people’s preferred social network – other networks are soon adding applications that allow people to listen to music and create playlists and the like – so because the experience in other networks is getting richer, audiences probably won’t find the need to come to a Dhingana.
It doesn’t seem to me like Dhingana has been particularly successful with respect to gathering users.
If anyone from Dhingana is reading – could you give us an idea of the number of users you guys have been able to add on since 2006?
One for the ‘This Entertained Me’ Files - Dhingana’s error page!
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Dhingana securing licenses is absurd. YashRaj films doesn’t sell their music licenses….. Please do your research before making such comments.
Thats the claim by Dhingana anyway