Google’s Orkut is extremely popular in some countries, while YouTube has been successful just about everywhere. And now iShare, a service from Rediff, intends to compete with both services, which begs the question of whether both – or neither – of them should be concerned in any market.
To clear up one thing – the matter of language barriers – Rediff is an Indian company (more on that in a minute), but everything on the corporate-run side of iShare is in English. To address a second question – what, exactly, does iShare do? – a prominent sentence on the site itself explains, “Share your videos, photos and music with friends.”
So now we know why people would use iShare, and who can use it. As for who will use it . . . this may become very big in India. The Business Standard, contentSutra, The Hindu, Tech2, TechShout, and TechTree have all written about iShare’s launch, and all of these sites and publications are based in India.
On the other hand, “American” sources are lacking, and the only other coverage I could find was from Softpedia, a useful Romanian site. So it looks like Orkut may indeed have a serious challenger on its hands, but YouTube doesn’t have to sweat (at least in America, and least not yet).
Still, even in India, iShare has a ways to go; it had 15 or fewer results for “hindi,” “manali,” and “zeest,” which are all tags provided by the site’s home page.
