Social Media Exposing All? Meet This New ‘Personal’ Network That Lets You Be Discreet

Like it or not, today’s social media can be your best friend or worst enemy. Especially if you have been indiscreet on a public platform, meant for all eyes. Had too many drinks at the office party and bashed the boss on Twitter? Posted ‘night outs’ on Facebook? Criticised a popular thought leader on LinkedIn? It could be a moment’s anger or despair or levity that triggered the action button, but these may quickly lead to dire consequences. Former PR executive Justine Sacco must have realised it by now after she was compelled to resign, post her racist joke on Twitter. But then, you are on social media – an ‘open’ platform where you are always under ‘public’ scrutiny.

A lot of these incidents can be avoided though, if those ‘feeds’, biased or otherwise, don’t turn up in the public domain. Most of us would rather share them with special people who matter. But unless one has the time to mail them individually, social media platforms are the quickest and the easiest way to reach people in a hurry. The only glitch is – all the world and his wife come to know of it as well. You can’t possibly tweet in private and most of your FB or Google+ posts are bound to be out at some place or other.

But it’s not that dicey if you are on Vebbler – a ‘personal’ networking platform recently launched by a Mumbai-based start-up. It’s easy to understand that people today are afraid to expose their entire social graph to all their contacts. In fact, that kind of layered communication is always happening in real life – you tend to segregate relationships and interact accordingly. And that’s where Vebbler comes in. It keeps you connected to all but uses a crowd layering model – so that users can post ‘custom’ feeds for each group and one group of connections can’t see the ‘feeds’ meant for others. Simply put, your relatives can’t see the feeds posted for your colleagues or close friends – it’s a totally compartmentalised life out there.

The ‘personal’ network (it resembles Path, Avocado, Nextdoor, Snapchat, etc.) also provides space for close and valued relationships. Unlike Facebook or Google+ where one can connect with a larger set of people, including acquaintances, distant relationships and people you may not even know, Vebbler makes sure that the ‘quality’ of connections are more important than the quantity.

But how is that done? The Dunbar Theory states that an average person cannot have more than 150 real-world connections in a given lifetime. Yet on social media, we can connect with a whopping 5,000 people or even more, resulting into useless clutter and a growing threat to privacy. In order to keep the quality of relationships high, a user can only connect with a maximum of 500 people on Vebbler. He/she can, however, ‘follow’ those whom he doesn’t know and connect with them on similar interests, striking a good balance between personal networking and interest networking.

Vebbler is open to anyone older than 13 and its target audience currently includes teenagers and young adults aged between 16 and 35. However, it has the potential to cater to other age groups as well. The platform also enables targeted content discovery (it means you can search for a person as CEO of XYZ company) and takes scrupulous care of user data security. That is definitely a relief after the latest Snapchat debacle where 4.6 million users’ personal information was exposed by hackers. Curious to know what all you can do on Vebbler? Here is a snapshot that captures the start-up’s vision and viability.

Who runs Vebbler (https://vebbler.com): A core team of 12 led by founder Sahil Bhagat while Ripal Kadakia heads the technical team. In addition, the start-up operates through 45 campus ambassadors who aim to bring colleges and universities across India and the world right on to the Vebbler platform. The company was set up in October 2012 and the social network Vebbler was launched in public beta on November 12, 2013.

A serial entrepreneur, Sahil has around 5 years of experience in the digital space and started his first venture Frogster.com at the age of 18. It was similar to Facebook Causes and connected like-minded people who were passionate about addressing various socio-economic issues. Sahil’s second venture was a 360 degree digital solutions firm called Doodle Works. He has majored in Advertising and Mass Media from KC College, Mumbai, and currently pursuing a distance course in Business Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

What inspired the venture: Frogster.com, to be precise. “I learnt a lot about the social networking business there, but we couldn’t keep it running as it was too niche a platform and did not scale in a way we had visualised it,” recalls Sahil. “That is when we decided to make it a mainstream social platform where ‘causes’ would be added some day.

What’s the pitch: A ‘personal networking’ platform that segregates different types of relationships and curates your online interaction the way you want it. Vebbler’s crowd layering (CL) model enables comprehensive and foolproof privacy settings when it boils down to data filtering for different groups. Plus, people have a lot more control over their data on Vebbler. Here, one can control photo tagging, lock private posts and filter status for different relationships.

How it works: The crowd layering model is the USP here. CL puts people into different layers so that they get an entirely separate sharing space but can’t access other layers. In simple terms, you can upload the snapshots of a party in the ‘friends’ layer but your ‘family’ layer won’t be able to view it.

Key features: Life Stream: A personal feed that shows stories and moments of the people you are connected to and those you are following based on similar interests. The Life Stream has several sub-streams based on specific relationships and these include friends, family, workmates, acquaintances and followings. You can also track nearby happening and trending topics.

Profile: A page that helps people know you, your connections and your interests.

Waves: Waves are the new hashtags with a ~ symbol. Each wavetag becomes a real-time analytics page that shows how many conversations are taking place around a particular keyword. People can also evaluate the popularity of a wave through the wave-o-meter (the web version of TRP) and compare it with the popularity of other waves. The Waves page also grabs all links, photos and videos related to that particular keyword shared on Vebbler.

Clubs & Followers: Clubs is another word for layers and every relationship has to be added to a particular Club before any request can be sent. Adding a person is discreet and the other person will never know to which club he/she has been added. Followers allow you to connect with people who you may not know but who share similar interests.

Photo Albums: Ability to upload photo albums and share it with respective Clubs. One can lock a private photo album so that nobody else can re-share or repost it. You can also control who can tag your photos and to whom those photos can be tagged.

Layered Chat & Private Messaging: Chat and private messaging offer instant communication with your connections and those within the network. It also uses the CL model to enable people to switch on/off a particular layer in chat. For example, a person on vacation can switch off from workmates but can stay connected with friends and family.

Social Search: On Vebbler, you can search people by name, by interest (for instance, people in Mumbai who like basketball) and by Wave. The third option allows you to search conversations around a wavetag and also displays other wavetags created around that keyword.

Claim to fame: Traction and mobile-first policy. The platform has been out in public beta only two months and the company already claims a user base of 45,000-plus from 80 countries and 713 cities. According to Sahil, an average of 45% people return to the network every day and most of them are from countries like the US, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Australia. This makes Vebbler a more global product than any of its homegrown competitors.

Moreover, keeping in mind the global trend, the start-up has adopted a mobile-first policy which further helps in gaining traction. Its mobile site called m.vebbler.com enables people to access a more lightweight version via their smartphones. The company is also developing an iOS app, which should be up in the next few months.

But what we have found most interesting is a bunch of new features Vebbler will be launching soon. The most relevant one in the Indian context will be a plug-in for poll information (candidate details, nearest polling booths, etc.) using geolocation technology. This will be launched in January-end while other features like Life Path (similar to Facebook Timeline) and Recommend Button (enables connections to recommend movies, books, TV shows, restaurants, holiday destinations and much more) are on their way. The company will also introduce more customised groups and revamp the portal.

Show me the money: Vebbler is currently bootstrapped but will be raising money in the next 2-3 months through the angel investment route. “We will approach the investors once the fine-tuning is done and new features are added to the platform,” says Sahil. The start-up is also exploring some tried-and-tested revenue models including social commerce and targeted advertising.

Biggest challenge: Spreading the product concept and competing with the industry biggies, especially companies like Path, Google+ and Facebook. “Luckily, we are already in the biggest and fastest growing markets. The Asian market will have the maximum number of smartphone users by 2017 and India could be the second biggest Internet consumer in a couple of years. This means further growth in networking and more innovation in product platforms. That really augurs well for Vebbler,” concludes Sahil.