I have been reading a lot about this microblogging service called Kwippy. So its’ time now that I unleash the critic (read monster) in me which I earlier did while reviewing Socialmedian on this blog. Kwippy always interested me for two reasons, one being that it was being called a Twitter clone and the other being that the startup is located in New Delhi, India. I decided to try this and let you guys know what I feel about this new kid and why you should or shouldn’t care about this in the herd of thousand other twitter clones.

Kwippy is still an invitation only web service so I had to wait like a day or two to get the registration code and sign up. Kwippy is disappointing if looks matters to you because their logo and the whole webpage lacks appeal and doesn’t emit the “Photoshop glow” we have started to expect from Web 2.0 sites.

Kwippy had one challenge from the very start and that was to differentiate itself from Twitter. Thankfully they did managed to stand out from the shadow of twitter but they had to take some inspiration from Friendfeed to do that which makes it a kind of poor amalgamation of Twitter and Friendfeed. Kwippy is all about storing your gmail or yahoo status messages so that other kwippy users can comment on it while a separate channel of kwips are integrated in the anticipation of greater interactivity.

The best that Kwippy has achieved so far is the integration with ping.fm and you get to see its logo on the ping’s home page as well.

I have many doubts about Kwippy ever going to make its presence felt especially when people can do more than just socialize with their status messages on Friendfeed. It’s unclear what is that vague gap that Kwippy wants to fill or whether it even exists.

Other than that, I would also like to express my contempt towards all those Indian startups who make the “Indianized” or “desi” version of some popular web products and expect that India users will embrace it hands down. I find the idea of making such products particularly foolish as its the World Wide Web where you gonna sell your idea and product and not the India Wide Web. Such products make sense when censorship is exercised in the particular market which is not the case in India.

Indians would prefer Google anytime over Guruji, an Indian serach engine which also got funded by some NRI venture capitalists. Baidu could capture the major search engine market share in China because Google was late in realizing the expectations of Chinese web users who prefer to search in Mandarin. The patterns of Indian web users are pretty similar to that of their western counterparts and any endeavor at making desi web products should be made only when you have a large target audience ready with supported infrastructure. One Indian website called Wenduniya is the case in point which is a VC funded Hindi web portal. Webduniya is clearly targeted towards the Hindi web users and the irony is that there is a huge market for it but the people who will use it ultimately don’t have the infrastructure ready. By infrastructure I mean cheap broadband connection which is rare in India as of now.

Kwippy will need something extraordinary to move out from the shadow Twitter & Friendfeed. Where’s the innovation dude?

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