Email more popular than social networking in India

Facebook, Twitter might be flavour of the season, but email remains more popular than social media as a method of internet communication for Indians, says a survey.

According to global research firm Ipsos, 68 per cent of people across India, who are connected online, send and receive emails while about 60 per cent communicate via social networking sites.

“Internet penetration in India has been very good in recent years, however, relative to country like China, India still does lack behind,” Biswarup Banerjee, Head of Marketing & Communications, Ipsos in India said.

Only 25 per cent use voice-over IP ( VOIP) for audio conversations conducted via an internet connection.

The Indian trend of communicating online is largely similar to the global scenario, as a strong majority (85 per cent) of online-connected global citizens in 24 countries use the internet for emails. Globally, 60 per cent use it for social networking, and little over one in ten use the internet for connecting with people through voice-over IP.

According to industry estimates, 103.6 million people will go online in 2012, and the number of users is expected to more than double to 221.6 million by 2015.

“This along with proliferation of internet access through smart phone will further increase the usage of email, social networking sites and other online communication tools,” said Banerjee.

Incidentally, according to another Ipsos survey, around 40 million Indians access the internet through their smart phones, 56 per cent of smartphone users in the country access the internet multiple times a day. Nearly 40 per cent surf the net at least once a day and only 6 per cent never use their phone for connecting to the Web.

Internet users in Hungary (94 per cent) are most likely to say they use the web for emailing, followed by nine in ten of those in Sweden (92 per cent), Belgium (91 per cent), Indonesia (91 per cent), Argentina (90 per cent) and Poland (90 per cent).

Meanwhile, 83 per cent of Indonesians access the net for social media, in Argentina the figure stands at 76 per cent, Russia (75 per cent) and seven in ten of those in South Africa (73 per cent), Sweden (72 per cent), Spain (71 per cent) and Hungary (70 per cent).

“Although Facebook and other popular social networking sites, blogs and forums, were founded in the United States the percentage of users was lower at six in 10, and in Japan it fell to 35 per cent, the lowest of the 24 countries in the global survey,” added Banerjee.

Ipsos interviewed a total of 19,216 adults in the month of February in an online survey across 24 countries.

Young Indians on Social Networks Through Mobile

A new survey has revealed that 30 percent of young Indians access social networking sites through mobile phones. The survey was conducted with over 350 respondents in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. In terms of usage, Facebook is the first, followed by LinkedIn

Indiabiz News and Research Services (INRS) has conducted this research and is called Social Media survey. The survey has also tried to breakdown the usage on social networking sites. It claims that 63 percent of those who took the poll have never engaged with Communities, Groups and Fan pages on networking sites. About 11 percent of users join social networking sites on recommendation from friend, the rest join on their own. 90 percent of the users join social networking site to follow or stay in touch with their friends, while 80 percent follow their friends for their pictures.

37 percent of the survey respondents were aged between 26-30 years age group and almost 35 percent of them were professionals with mid-level jobs. This might be the reason that LinkedIn dominated with 45.8 percent vote, followed by 36.5 percent for YouTube and 29.6 percent for Twitter. Strangely the survey does not tell us and statistic about Facebook but just claims that it has the highest usage.

Facebook shut its Lite site after just seven months

Facebook has shut down its Lite site aimed at users with slow or poor internet connections.

The stripped down version of the original ran for around seven months.

Facebook posted a note on its own fan page thanking those who used Lite, adding that it had “learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site”.

“I think a lot of the Facebook experience was left out of Lite, especially the monetisable parts,” said Ray Valdes of Gartner Research.

“The other part of this decision is probably because they have improved the performance sufficiently with the main part of Facebook and made things run better that they didn’t need this back-up approach to cover a situation of low performance,” Mr Valdes told BBC News.

The technology blog ReadWriteWeb.com had described the Lite site as a “Twitter-like experience” of the popular microblogging service because it offered a smaller number of features than the fully-fledged site.

The options on Facebook Lite were limited to letting users write on their wall, post photos and videos, view events and browse other people’s profiles. There were no applications or special boxes.

“In some ways the Lite version was like using ad block on their own site – it stripped the site down to the very basics,” said Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.

The change was announced on Facebook’s own profile page and offered few details as to why the service has been closed down.

“It would seem not enough people were using it but then there was not a lot of awareness about the product. Tears will not be shed over the loss of Facebook Lite,” Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook.com told BBC News.

A number of commentators on the social media blog Mashable.com said that they used it because it was not blocked at their office while some said they thought it “would have been a nice support for low bandwidth nations”.

Olive Announces Triple SIM QWERTY Phone

The Olive brand is now famous in the country for one device they launched last month. Remember the Olive FrvrOn handset? Probably the only phone in the world to come in dual power options. The phone, apart from having a normal Li-Ion battery, also packed in a slot for an AA battery that can be used to power the phone for a few minutes in an emergency.

The same company has now announced the launch of the Wiz VGC800, a new triple SIM QWERTY mobile for the Indian market. Olive claims it is the first triple SIM phone to arrive in a QWERTY keypad form factor. The VGC800 supports two GSM SIM cards and a CDMA connection.

The phone is social networking ready and comes with Facebook Twitter, MSN and Yahoo clients. It also comes preloaded with Opera Mini for browsing needs. Thanks to the QWERTY keypad and a decent e-mail client, it can double up as a capable e-mail device as well.

Other features include a basic 2.0 megapixel camera. The screen is a not so large 2.2-inch one capable of displaying 262K colors. Connectivity options include Bluetooth and USB. It has a built in FM radio, stereo headset and speaker phone.

The Olive Wiz VGC800 is priced at Rs. 6,000.