One may wonder that how many social network do we use? How many of them are American? How many of them are Indian ? How many of them are Pakistani? The answer is that we use most social networks that are either Indian or American. The famous examples can be Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Yaari, Fropper, BigAdda etc. But wait a moment, None of them is Pakistani!
Well Yes ! There are social networks in Pakistan too. The scenario of social networks in Pakistan is like: They come and they die. Is this because of less potential in Pakistani market? Certainly Not! You may know this fact that Pakistanis stand at 3rd position to use the Orkut, worldwide.
Hence, potential is there, but Pakistani social networks didn’t had the features or maybe the marketing tools.
We have lots of social networking sites that were started by small web development houses. They were either based on a ready-made platform or features copied from famous sites. So had less potential and ultimately they disappeared. We had been wishing that some big company from Pakistan should invest and start online services like social networking etc. There was a setback and a landmark was built when Naseeb.com was launched.
Naseeb.com has the proper bases and funding from Silicon Valley. Still it failed to gain much popularity because it is more of a matchmaking site.
Then came another so called site from a well known brand ‘Intel Pakistan,’ the name of the website was IntelYouth.Net. They spent hell massive budget on marketing in colleges, universities. They gave away the rewards and bonuses to the users. But they lacked the proper planning as they were more focusing towards the marketing side than of the product. So the ultimate result was that IntelYouth.Net went offline after a short period of its launch and now it’s been more than a year that it says ‘Website Under Construction.’
But yet people haven’t given up. They have still been trying to get into the race of social networking competitions. If we see the current scenario, it shows that there are many Pakistani social networks which are going smooth or successful so far. Most Notably PakAlumni.com, Stop.pk, Yello.pk, Naseeb.com, Lounge.pk, chopaal.pk and many others. The market is being liberated and standards are being improved.
So the moral of the story is, Talent is there, Market Potential is there, only the decent investments and concentration can do the charm!