fJungle: A Social Media Aggregator with Extra Punches

fJungle allows you to send tweets longer than 140 charactersWhenever a discussion concerning social media pops up, current favorites naturally include the big three- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  What if all three of them could be accessed and used equally efficiently via a single sign in? This is what a couple of entrepreneurs from Chennai asked themselves and eventually came up with fJungle. KM Muthukumar, co-founder at fJungle says, “fJungle is a Value-Added Social Media Aggregator. While all the other social media aggregators like hootsuite concentrate on business users; we have always kept in mind the average social media user since we started building it. ‘f’ denotes friends, family, facebook – we wanted fJungle to be a great place where you could hang out with your friends.”

The core team at fJungle comprises of co-founders Tony Varghese and Muthukumar Marappan, graduates of Visual communication and commerce respectively, at Loyola College, Chennai. They started working on fJungle from mid-2009 before there were platforms to integrate multiple social networks in the market. Devoid of technical expertise, Manjush, who currently is the technical head at fJungle, filled in the vacancy. “Initially we didn’t even know what API or oAuth meant and thought we would just store the usernames and passwords into our database for signing into multiple networks, which would of course, be illegal. I strongly believe that it takes non-technical people to identify a real need in the environment. A technical person would have built a product based on what he knows, whereas non-technical founders focus and build the product based on need,” says Muthukumar. Being a self funded venture providing a free application, a huge 38000 USD has already been invested on their product.

I visited their website earlier today and this is how the process works. The user signs up with fJungle using his/her email, adds his/her facebook, LinkedIn and twitter accounts following which he/she will be signed into all three networks. Also, these are some of the features of fJungle that one can observe:

• All three of these social networks can be accessed upon a single sign in to fJungle
• All three social networks will have similar layouts associated with their original websites.
• All features permitted by the API’s of the social media can be used- like status posting, uploading pictures, commenting, messaging etc.

Talking about more features, Muthukumar adds, “fJungle is not just a social media aggregator – we have added a custom feature with this release – where you could send out long tweets which your followers could read entirely within their twitter stream”

This is made possible by breaking the tweet and sending it out as a bunch of tweets together. Talking in the literal sense, the tweet size is same but all your tweets are bunched together and hence the continuity remains.

Also, there are plenty more features that fJungle are coming up with in future versions. Says Muthukumar, “Since the features allowed by the API’s are limited, we have planned to equip fJungle with customized features that fJungle users can use themselves.” Some of them include:

• Chat with LinkedIn contacts who use fJungle.
• Real-time chat with twitter followers who use fJungle.
• Manage multiple Twitter and Facebook profiles with a single sign-in.
• Right now, you can post a tweet that is longer than 140 characters on fJungle which will be posted a single tweet in your timeline, so that your followers can read your long tweet easily without moving out of the twitter interface on their mobile devices.
• Integrate more social networks such as Yammer, Google+ and Pinterest in next releases.

Matching these targets and getting a huge user base on the platform will be no cakewalk but the reticent planning and a strong foundation might make it big for them.

Check them out at – www.fjungle.com