With all the Facebook, Twitter and Buzz making the headlines almost daily and Indian users taking to using these websites regularly has almost taken Hindi down from the web. Users nowadays interact only in English over these social networks. But MSN India Chief Sanjay Trehan has a different opinion altogether about the way users interact over the web in India. According to him the next growth in the online space will be powered by vernacular content. With all this in mind, MSN India has teamed up with Webduniya.com to launch a microsite – MSN Yuva. This portal is basically targeted at youth audience residing in Tier II and III Indian towns. Wikipedia and Google have also done hindi stunts in the past.
MSN Yuva has hindi content throughout and it seems to be more of a hindi blog rather than a portal. It has content authored in the Hindi language from avenues such as News, Sports, Fun, Careers, Fitness, Romance, Stars and more. MSN India also has plans of launching similar web portals in other regional languages such as Tamil in the coming few months. In addition to this MSN has also made direct access available to the readers of MSN Yuva to Webduniya’s Hindi Social Networking Website – Dosti – users to create their profiles and a network of friends, send and receive messages or scraps – all this in Hindi.
There are also other activity sections such as a youth meter, a confession zone and a zodiac sign prediction. Although we see a few advertisements on the microsite but MSN India has clarified that there is no advertising revenue sharing arrangement with Webduniya.com and that Webduniya.com will be paid for the content used by MSN Yuva.
Well the concept of this hindi portal and hindi social network puzzles me a bit. We are a developing nation and almost every family tries to educate their children especially in the english medium. Indian children are made to study English in schools so that they can compete with other children around the world in their future careers. While most of us talk in hindi we may not necessarily read in hindi too much atleast the current junta on internet hence I do not know, but somehow I am not able to digest this very idea of the portal – MSN Yuva. You can justify and clarify my doubts by leaving a comment below.
“We are a developing nation…Having such hindi portals will definitely hamper that process.”
ROFL:)
Dear Saha,
Your analysis is as funny as your face.
The last paragraph just goes on to show how bad this whole analysis is. English, developing nation blah blah
Tamil and not Hindi is right now the most abundant Indian language on the Web. The only language in India to posses complete translation of even electronic engineering datasheets is the Tamil language (FYI only 3 other Asian languages have complete datasheets). It is good that they “are planning”, but not good that this should have been already done.