Monday, June 11, 2007

A cool Social Bookmarking Site with a difference - BestOfIndya : Reviewed

Today I wanted to let you know about this cool Social Bookmarking site called BestOfIndya. I have been on this particular site for a long time now and since it is a relatively new start-up, so a lot of suggestions and feature requests have flow to and fro from me to the developer of the site - A cool guy called Ramesh [More on the prank I played on the developer a little later :)].

Well, what sets this particular Social Bookmarking site from the rest of the sites is it's unique Shared Revenue Model. I will touch upon this feature in a few seconds. Now you may be wondering what is Social Bookmarking all about? Well, it is the same as the local bookmarks that you maintain - but the bookmarks are shared with your community - here the BestOfIndya community of users. The community members can then vote/comment on the stories and the stories that are most voted up are published on the main page of the site - So you really know what your friends are reading on.

The best feature of any Social Bookmarking site is it's ability to allow comments. The comments allow for a friendly discussion on the topic. This feature helps users bond with fellow users and make friends within the community.

Now getting back to the DIFFERENCE with BestOfIndya in respect to other Social Bookmarking sites is that it supports a cool feature called Shared Revenue. Here's how it works :
  • You enter your Google Adsense Publisher ID in the profile page of your account in BestOfIndya.
  • Whenever your story that you have Bookmarked at BestOfIndya is viewed by a user, there is an algorithm that kicks in and there is a 50% chance that the Ads that appear in the story page are from your Adsense ID.
Now, some may say why only 50%. Well, the other 50% goes to the site owner since he has to bear the costs involved in maintaining the servers, back-ups, etc.

Now the Prank!!

As most of you know, I am generally not a person to play pranks on others. But lo and behold, the devil inside me kicked in when the beloved developer of BestOfIndya - Ramesh pinged me 2 days back. I just started irritating him by saying that he has faked a whole host of people with his previous site(a fake search engine to be specific) hosted on the same domain. For a moment he was shocked and I guess he spent a sleepless night too - Sorry buddy.

I just went blabbering the scrap for 2 full days and I even threatened that I will do an "expose" of his previous site(which was a cook-up) on my blog. He was so baffled that he found it hard to convince me that he had purchased the domain only a few months back and had no clue in the activities of the previous owner of the site. He even said that the chat messages were all saved just in case they were needed later :) (So serious hahahaaa)

I was just laughing my heart out during this entire time. This morning he said he had consulted some of his friends and they advised him that I may be looking to make a gain by putting up all these false accusations. That's when I decided it's time to reveal the truth. Comm'on buddy I wouldn't do that kind of a stuff for any personal / monetary gains.

So it was all just a prank and you do run a wonderful service. I love being a part of the Ohana(the word for Family in Hawaiian) at BestOfIndya. Sorry Ramesh if I did ever hurt your feelings, its just too boring with loads of work and I thought of playing this prank.

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