Comments on: Rediff rolls out its API platform for developers…

By: Isinc

Isinc — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:57:49 +0000

Quoted–India headquartered and Nasdaq listed, Rediff.com India Limited (NASDAQ:REDF) grew its unique users in June 2008, as measured by ComScore Media Metrix, by approximately 13% over the corresponding figure for March 2008. As per Comscore data, in this 3-month period Rediff grew at a rate approximately double that of the average growth rates in the Indian internet market and ahead of the growth rate of international portals like Google and Yahoo! in India.
Source: http://www.smartbrief.com/news/IAB/companyData.jsp?companyId=11168

By: Aravindan

Aravindan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:39:07 +0000

Couldn’t agree more with Manu.

“This move is an indication that the Indian homegrown portals are not going to allow the global biggies to eat the cake out of their hands.”

Google already ate the ’social’ cake using Orkut. Rediff is just trying to get the leftovers. IMHO, Rediff is analogous to copycat. Yahoo mail -> rediff mail, yahoo messenger -> rediff bol, yahoo homepage -> rediff homepage and so on.

By: Gaurav

Gaurav — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:25:30 +0000

I agree with comment above that it is a blatant and very poor rip off. Please, we dont have to support rediff just because it happens to be an indian company and just an announcement doesn’t amount to any innovation.

By: Manu

Manu — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:28:51 +0000

It would have been “all right” if they gave attribution to facebook. Ripping off even documentation without attribution is definitely not “all right”. You say it was a rushed release. But what have they released ?????. There is not a single application and the API is also not available right now. An announcement doesn’t count as a release. And no matter however rushed it was attribution is something that takes hardly any time.

And secondly you can’t stay close to both opensocial and facebook development platforms. One is primarily a server side platform [facebook] and the other is client side implemented in javascript. Though both are converging towards having both server side and client side capabilities, right now they are vastly different.

And if they wanted to be close to opensocial, they could have done that legally and openly. Here is the list of partners implementing opensocial. http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/partners.html

And how is the developers life going to be easy if rediff if not forthcoming about the similarities between its platform and facebook’s ?. For a developer who has no experience with facebook’s platform rediff’s platform will look like yet another platform. So I think this has got to do with making rediff’s life easier by taking shortcuts and them trying to score some bragging points with having a deveoper platform.

By: Nilesh

Nilesh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:34:01 +0000

Manu,

It is all right. From what I hear, it was a rushed off release they had to do with Proto launch. And their objective has been to stay close to facebook and opensocial development frameworks so I think it is all right. Even better for developers that the learning curve may be easy and they can get to productive work quite fast.

cheers
nilesh

By: Manu

Manu — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:34:24 +0000

Looking at the license it required 1. attribution and 2. distribution of any modifications under the same license.

By: Manu

Manu — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:30:13 +0000

Damn.. I had forgotten that facebook open sourced their platform. If rediff is using that, which is very likely coming to think of it would rebranding [ripping off] be a license violation ?