India is in desperate need of Facebook desi, will PM Modi deliver?

Although launched with much fanfare by the house of Patanjali Ayurved, “ Kimbho & amp; # 39; which means “ how are you & amp; # 39; or “ what's up & amp; # 39; promising features like chat, multimedia, voice and video calls, video conferencing and collaboration, Kimbho's mishap has left the global developer community laughing at us.

In a country where nearly 300 million people are on Facebook, another 400 million on WhatsApp and more than 200 million on the Chinese application TikTok – not to mention the millions who are hooked on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat – there is no There has not been a single social media platform to date with its roots in India which has made headlines around the world.

Look at China. He has Weibo which is an equivalent of the micro-blogging platform Twitter; Renren, who is essentially Facebook for China; WeChat which is an avatar of WhatsApp; Baidu is their Google and Youku and Tudou are YouTube from China.

WeChat is the largest social media platform in China, with over one billion active users per month. The other apps also control a user base running in the millions. China doesn't need Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter but in India you can't start your day without any of the apps based in the United States.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing that he will avoid all social media platforms on Sunday says he could switch to a new swadeshi social media platform and could also ask his supporters to follow him.

Swadeshi Jagran Manch and RSS think tanks have suggested launching an Indian social media platform like Facebook and YouTube. In the middle of all this, hubbub is an application that has its origin in the country: ShareChat.

ShareChat has a user base of over 60 million monthly active users spread across the country and available in 15 languages, including Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, punjabi, telugu, tamil, bengali, odia, kannada, assamese, aryanvi, rajasthani, bhojpuri and urdu.

According to Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and CEO of ShareChat, Indians need a platform to express themselves in their own language.

"Although there have been English social media platforms that exist in the Indian ecosystem, these could hardly succeed in spreading beyond a certain set of In addition, before ShareChat, there were no Internet platforms created for Indian users and customized according to their preferences. ", Sachdeva told IANS.

The Bengaluru-based regional language social platform became so popular that even Twitter came into play when the four-year-old company raised $ 100 million in its Series D funding cycle last year. "ShareChat is truly an Indian application, created for all Indians who want to explore the Internet," said Sachdeva.

More than 90 percent of the next billion Internet users are expected to come from non-English speaking backgrounds, hence platforms like ShareChat that are poised to accelerate their growth. Experts say that running a messaging app like WhatsApp requires high-end IT infrastructure.

"You need a team of Open Source experts, Cloud experts and the Content Delivery Network (CDN), data engineers, an internal team lead developers, API developers, user interface (UI) developers, an internal test team, and user data simulation team, to run an application like WhatsApp, said Anoop Mishra, one of the country's leading social media experts.

"You also need an outsourced hacking team that continues to find flaws in the existing system that was completely lacking in & # 39; Kimbho & # 39; which was a poorly scripted application," Mishra told IANS.

Modi will join or launch a new native social media app on Sunday remains to be seen, but the time has come to have several desi variants of popular social media apps – with a truly professional approach unlike the “ Kimbho & amp; #8211; to keep users & amp; # 39; data in the country and tackle fake news and misinformation with great efficiency.