Launch of a facebook clone in Drupal: Smart move by EBIZONTEK

Crawling around web, i recently found a website kickwork.com.For a second i got confused whether i have opened facebook by mistake.Guys watch out KICKWORK, these people have done a mind blowing job.They have actually built a facebook clone.On doing lot of research on kickwork , i found kickwork is not just a social networking platform but the power that it carries with itself is the framework on which it is buit...what else...its DRUPAL.
I think with Drupal as the platform on which kickwork is built , kickwork can actually rock the world. The guys around kickwork are the same who released Drupaligg (an open source Digg clone).They are Ebizontek guys.Every next day i see some or the other new application released over Drupal by ebizontek.It seems Ebizon guys are drupal experts. I think launching kickwork at this moment in time when the social networking market is really really HOT is a very smart move by these guys.They might be thinking of making it open source(thats why its a smart move at teh right time). Drupaligg has already hit the Digg clone market all over the world. Now its kickwork's time.
The myth that indians are far behind in open source development has been made true by these people. Infact, when i started with Drupal development, i heard that there are hardly 50 good drupallers in india.But the trend seems to have been changed.Ebizontek has done a wonderful job not just technically by making Digg clone and Facebook clone but also strategically by making kickwork and Drupaligg open source.
Hats off to you guys. I am waiting anxiously for kickwork to be open source. I desperately want to see its code and contribute to the development of Kickwork.

Dupaligg over Pligg

Long time back i had posted about creating Digg Clones DRUPALIGG and PLIGG. The power of Drupal brings Drupaligg over Pligg.
Reasons:

• Adding modules in Drupaligg is very much easily possible. Like if you want to add something like Digg spy, it is really simple with Drupal6.0.

• Flexibility in adding Forums/Blogs.
• Flexibility in creating custom themes or modifying current theme.

• Social networking is a real hot market these days. It is mushrooming at an excellent rate. Because Drupaligg is created over Drupal, so any social networking site can be integrated with Drupaligg. Imagine a facebook + Digg . Social Networking can be tied to anything and everything.

The Live sites running over Drupaligg are:
Minkit
MyMobilePals
SocialWeBee

Diggindianews is now MinkIt

Diggindianews is now with a new avatar as Minkit. The concept of MinkIt is simple. Open source happens when the demand side starts supplying itself. As Open source came as a revolution to proprietorship, the same way MinkIt is born as a revolution to current indian mainstream media. Presently mainstream media is in the few hands and is easily manipulated and influenced by rich and powerful people. MinkIt has the power to turn readers into news editors and transform conventional journalism to Distributed journalism.

For those of you who haven't heard about MinkIt, it's a news site for india that relies on its readers to determine what the most important news stories/headlines are that day. With lots of newspapers being in india, each one it either gives a scattered news or even if it is local there is still no platform that gives local news for a location on internet. MinkIt brings localised concept to news. Any local news for a particular city from classifieds to jobs to news can be published by any user. The most minked news comes in the front page. Any person from a local city can bring his news/blog/matrimony/resume/advertize his shop/classifieds for anything, and submit in MinkIt. He does not need to visit newspaper publishing houses and spend money in getting his news published because MinkIt provides this facility free of cost. A common man can simply target the local public for his business through internet. Lets say for example i stay in noida and i have a car that i want to sell then i simply join MinkIt and go to classified section and make a posting for my maruti car. The people of that city who are interested in buying my car can contact me by seeing my classified posting.

MinkIt has been launched at a perfect timing when indian mainstream media has made normal public frustrated of the way how they manipulate news as per their business. MinkIt is powerful because the public has right to vote down the news which is absolute junk. This is why MinkIt is called Distributed Journalism. We have the right to enjoy democracy in every aspect and with Minkit we can surely bring transparency to indian news content.

Online photo rating site for india ------ratehotindia.com------

Are you interested in knowing how hot you are??How people rate your attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10??If this is what you are looking for then RateHotIndia would be the best place.

RateHotIndia is an online photo rating site where community rates a users photo on a scale of 1 to 10.There are already similar successful companies like HOTorNOT in USA. As internet user growing at an exponential rate in india, it seems RateHotIndia could be an exiting space targeting indian internet market. Plus the timing seems to be right for the launch. Lot of other startups have been running after rating engine but rating photos is by far the best concept that i have come across because of the charm that a photo carries. Any two people can have different choices in defining how HOT a person is on a scale of 1 to 10.

The revenue stream for RateHotIndia would be advertisements as of now. But as they expand their target would be around subscription for dating i suppose. A question that has come to my mind is how are these people connecting users? Is it through comments or sending emails or something else which is going to get launched soon?? Well thats a mystery i suppose. And as of now comments and messages are meant to connect users.

New release of Drupaligg(Themes more stable)

As i have mentioned in my previous post about Drupligg release.I faced some issues during installation which are mentioned below:
1) Voting views
2) Problem in theme.When opened in Firefox, few links were not getting clicked. The release wasnt quite stable in IE and Firefox.

These issues have been solved in latest release of Drupaligg. Now the theme seems to be stable in IE and Firefox both. Download the source code for the same at: Drupaligg Source Code:Latest release as of 24/08/2007.

The Drupaligg team seems to be working hard to make Drupaligg more and more stable.I saw their blog Drupaligg Blog which says that "Next Drupaligg Release is likely have more themes and also, would include blogs, articles and other drupal content types in the voting widget that would be configurable. I would also try to incorporate more power into Drupaligg like creating user karmas based on voting, invitation and some action."

But the best thing that would help me personally and might be of useful to many of Drupaligg users would be thePligg to Drupaligg Migration Script.I am eagarly looking forward to have this script released asap.

Share files for free on "FTP2share"

In this era of Internet, content sharing platforms have also become very popular. Some content sharing ventures include Stumbleupon for sharing websites, Slideshare for sharing powerpoint presentations, Diggindianews for sharing news.
The next killer startup in this domain is FTP2Share. As the name describes, it is a tool which allows you to share your files with as many people and that too absolutely free. It is very simple to use. In simple words it is Single Upload - Single Link - Multiple Download Sources
People who host websites that share information which needs to be downloaded can benefit a lot from FTP2share. Also, it can be useful for the people who want to share music,data etc.
I used to upload loads of files to various file uploading sites ( eg. rapidshare.com) for sharing among my friends. But all these services had some time limits and download limits . To overcome this i had to create a number of mirrors of the same file in different services. But thenit is quite tedious to manually upload the same file in different services through a web interface . Today while i was surfing Diggindianews, i came to know about a FTP2SHARE service which is easy as well as free.

Drupaligg: The Open Source Digg/Reddit clone using PHP based Drupal

Popularity of Digg is increasing day by day and the demand for Digg clone is even higher.When i was crawling over internet to find Digg clone, i came across Drupaligg which built around Drupal with the functionality of Pligg also there. Drupal+Pligg Content management system. And the best part is it is available open source.The source code for the same can be downloaded at Drupaligg Source Code
I have been using Pligg by far but was stuck with the limitations of Pligg in adding forums,blogs,etc. Well with Drupaligg, the advantage of Drupal comes free with Pligg.The power of not only gives voting API but also social networking feature addition becomes easy.
I am just waiting for Drupaligg people to release migration script so that i can easily migrate my content from Pligg to Drupaligg and release my product asap.