Microsoft tries to connect Indians together
A new social networking service seem to pop up every other day, making our social network an increasingly complicated disconnected incoherent web of independent contacts stretched across multiple services.
Microsoft’s Windows Live Planet is a new social networking website by Microsoft targeted towards Indian youth. It uses a matchmaker’s approach to finding friends. The personal details you enter are matched with the other details to find people most like you, or most dislike you, if you prefer that sort of thing.
If you already have a Live ID, you’re all set, sign in and start entering you profile details. Windows Live Planet takes the “Planet” rather seriously, asking simply “Mars or Venus” instead of gender, “On Planet Earth Since” for your age, “Where on Planet Earth” for your country. I for one was offended by the lack of a “Select Your Planet” option. While filling the form I realized that the four options for each question approach left me selecting “No Answer” for rather a lot of thing, which is never good.
To help you get started, you can invite friends from other networks, but it’s hard to see a reason why, since nothing much special is being offered. The matchmaker is a good feature, but better suited for social butterflies looking to make friends, so if you’re new to social networking and have few friends online, this might be a better bet than some of the others out there. With FaceBook and Orkut already popular in India, and both supporting applications, communities etc, Windows Live Planet is still far behind.
Do you really need to join another social service because those three people you never talk to invited you? You never know, it might be the next hot thing, and then you’ll get to tell people how you were in it all along before all the “hype” ruined it. When adding friends Windows Live Planet quite provocatively asks “Where the heck R ur friends?”, and really where the heck are they? Not on this planet.