The Ambani family owns Reliance Industries and the company made $19.976 billion ($2.033 billion in profit) in 2006. Reliance is the first and only private sector company in India to be featured in the 2006 Fortune Global 500 list. And they are ranked 342 in the world’s largest corporations.
Considering the reputation that the company has at stake, I was shocked to see the lack of quality in its social network BigAdda.com.
Your first friend on BigAdda is someone nicknamed “Boss.” Having this guy as your first friend when you join the social network feels a bit jarring since he is not smiling at all. Boss, take a lesson from MySpace’s Tom.
When you view Boss’ profile, the number of friends he has is hidden so finding out how many users the social network has is not transparent. Tom on MySpace tells you right now that he has over 176,485,527 friends.
Considering the buying power and backing that Reliance has coupled with the admiration that the country of India has for the Ambanis, I expected better.
But I do give the company credit for ensuring that the social network has the usual social networking features like profile pictures, photo albums, videos, blogs, and the ability to create groups and associations (addas). But another problem I see with the social network is that there are no privacy settings.
The next problem is that tags on the homepage do not function correctly. If you click on an individual tag, it’ll just redirect you to the videos page and not to the videos filtered by the tags:
The website appears to still be in a testing phase, so perhaps there is still time to improve the system.
