Startup Review : Phulki.com
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Seven minutes into using Phulki, and my first reaction was - WoW. An online service, Phulki lets you search for music tracks from various online sources. Then, right there, you can add various tracks (from different sources, of course) to the online, in-browser playlist and play it right from there. Yes, without downloading anything.
So, the home page is a minimalistic search page. It loads fast, real fast. On the home page itself, you see some suggestions for the “New Albums”, “Popular Search” and “Featured Playlists”. “Featured Playlists” has items such as “Sufi and Quawwalis”, “Punjabi”, “Party Time”. Clicking on any one of them loads the genre songs in the playlist and starts playing them.
The coolest feature was a playlist named “kuchh bhi” and that too, in Hindi. “Kuchh Bhi” has a selection of 20 songs randomly selected by Phulki.com. I liked the ones that the engine selected for me.
Almost anything can be put in the search box. Artist names, album name, song name, even the 
actor names. The search engine even suggests you options in case you misspelled some name.
The interface was neat and easy on the system. The songs loaded without much trouble. Once you load a few songs in the playlist, you can search for another song or album, right there in the same window and add the new songs to the existing playlist.
Phulki works by crawling number of Indian music websites.
Phulki.cm is founded by Pankaj Gupta and Anurag Gupta, both IIT-Delhi alumini. The two guys came up with the idea of Phulki while having a casual discussion about how difficult it is to sift through the plethora of cluttered Indian music websites. The duo then went on to design an efficient search engine to index all the music on the Indian music websites and present them in a tidy interface for the end user. And from what I saw, I must say, they have succeeded. At least on the interface front.
On the music quality front, well, I was satisfied from what I got. It was pretty good. The volume level could have been a bit higher. But it still was quite satisfactory.
There are links to creating an account and logging in, too. You can create and save the playlists after creating an account. Good use, if you are on the move and need to access a lot of public computers.
The Terms of Service of Phulki currently prohibits the user to access the Phulki database through some interface other than the default interface. Here’s what their ToS says:
“You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Phulki, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Phulki. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.”
If Phulki becomes popular, third party plugines will follow. I am sure the Phulki guys already know this. Although, I understand, they might be worried about the loss of advertising revenues. No, there are not any advertisements on the website yet. But it’s not hard to imagine that they will come up with ads, eventually.
Overall, a good service.
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Some thoughts on Phulki.com and this review -
On Phulki.com -
1. Well, Phulki.com is a site that hosts MP3 content under the guise of being a “search engine”.
2. They have crawled and parsed the meta data from the music sites but when you play a song, it is streamed from phulki.com (MP3 files). This can be easily proved.
3. The search is better than most sites hosting MP3 content, and that’s were it delivers.
4. How do the sites benefit who are hosting this content? Phulki takes their meta data and plays it on its own site!!
It is like Google indexing the world wide web and displaying all the content of the web on Google itself rather than taking people to the respective sites. IMAGINE!!
To top it all, they are asking people to comply with their robots.txt file!!
On this review -
When WATBlog reviews a product/start-up, readers like me expect to see some depth in the review.
This post looks more like a reaction from a naive user..the typos can be excused..but we need more substance..
Hope things get better..
- Sam
Nice review! I came across Phulki a couple of weeks ago and liked it a lot. Indeed, this site is easy to use and grows on you…
The quality isnt good and going down day by day as I think number of users is increasing. On my home 256Kbps broadband connection (nothing else getting downloaded in parallel) song were interrupted a lot. So if they dont solve buffering related issues then wont catch up with user base. Though interface is definitely good.
@Sushrut
It is hard to get this kind of data just by watching our logs :-). Thanks for the feedback and tip. We are looking into how to improve buffering on our player.
Meanhile, you might across a few “lower” quality songs. They will load faster. See if that helps! Red indicates a lower quality song (typically smaller size file).
Also, please feel free provide us with feedback from the site as well.
Thanks
Anurag
@Sam
Each to his own.
I liked the site and the service.
Well, as a user, I don’t care where the song comes from. Phulki lets me search and listen to my favourite songs, and that’s good enough for me. No, its NOT like Google hosting the entire http://WWW. WRONG example.
@Rohit
Thanks. I’m glad you liked it.
@Sushrut
I guess they need to invest more in infrastructure. As you can see, you have already made your voice heard to Phulki through WATBlog..let’s hope they work on it.
@Anurag
It is always a pleasure to see the founders have their comments on our posts. I already like Phulki, as is obvious from the post, there are a few issues and some of our readers have expressed them here. I hope you will work
to rectify the issues. Please keep coming back for more.
i think
it’s great
1)no downlaod,
2)it’s fast
3)quality is good
4)it is something new
now i came to know about Guruji music
which is similar to phulki but it is much faster and has better quality
Hello Folks,
Phulki just released search for Tamil songs as well. Try it out - feedback welcome (and needed).
Thanks
Anurag