BANGALORE: Inspired by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a 21 year old management student is on an ambitious mission to build his own social network. Rahul Khanna, a student from Mumbai, has teamed up with some of his college mates and is on his way to launch a new social networking website which will try to "fill in the gap left by existing networks."
Says Khanna, "To be honest I was inspired by Facebook. One day when we were accessing Facebook during the exam time and nothing fruitful came out..thats when I felt why don't we fill in the gap and try to take social networking to a new level."
The social networking site, socheers.com, was launched in beta mode (testing phase) about three months back. Khanna has registered a self funded company, Socheers Infotech Private Limited , along with seven others and is planning to officially launch the site in about two months from now.
The site already has more than 18,000 registered users, claims Khanna who heads marketing and strategy for the company. Khanna's site went through an incident which is strikingly similar to Facebook which managed to overwhelm the Harvard University server when it was first launched.
"After we went live, word spread fast. The shared server we rented in Australia could not cope with the incoming traffic and had to shut down all the sites hosted on the server. We are now moving to a dedicated server in Nasik," he said.
Khanna is a student of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) university. "We have not done any promotions so far. First, we want to concentrate on the user interface and features," he said.
Besides the regular social media features like the status update and sharing, the site has features like the "jukebox" which allows you discover music your friends like and regional language chat. It also lets you upload and share documents and post videos.
"Soon a new feature which has to do with women and fashion will also be added to the site. This will be a compelling reason to be on socheers.com," said Khanna.
