Indiatimes Launches Social Networking Site - itimes.com

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So it’s been well over a year and a half in the making, and the in the meantime the bloom appears to have gone off the social networking boom in India: finally Times Internet (Indiatimes) has soft-launched its social networking site - itimes.com.

Take a look around here (screencap). itimes users are given an email address separate from Indiatimes. Considering the media push around Indiatimes Mail, I wonder why they went ahead with a login and email separate from Indiatimes. A screencap of the profile page here. There’s also a gaming zone, much like Indiatimes has a gaming zone. The site has blogs, but again - what about O3? itimes has a classifieds section/marketplace, similar to YoList. Why not incorporate existing Indiatimes properties and content, and have a social network around it, instead of running two separate ecosystem with fairly similar features? Perhaps there are legacy issues with Indiatimes…

More after the jump, and in the comments.

What’s most interesting? itimes appears to be ready to open up its API from the word go (screencap) - I’ve requested for a developer guide via the site, and am awaiting a mail with details (been 20 minutes, no mail). Some details here. They’re also allowing users to upload videos and photos here. Well, that’s that then - so far, in beta, it appears to be a fairly basic social networking site. What’ll differentiate it from the rest are the users that Times Internet is able to get on board with a media push. Any plans for integration with 58888?

I wonder how much they paid for the domain name itimes.com (any guesses?)...over the past year that Indiatimes has taken to launch this site, there were a bunch of odd names doing the rounds - including some as vague as “bickering”.

Update: It’s been around 15 hours, and I still haven’t received the developer guide. Maybe it’s something they intend to introduce later.