MyWindow; About.me on steroids from the outside, full fledged social network from the inside

The Kyron Accelerator in Bangalore is brewing an interesting social network. By loading it with features and visual appeal, MyWindow.me is like about.me on steroids. It is founded by Nikunj

Agarwal and Veer Mishra, who are both fresh out of college. Along with a team of six other people, MyWindow.me is an endeavor to be a platform where its users can follow people as well as their passions.The site is currently in a private beta and you would have to request for an invite. There are some demo profiles, which you can play around with to understand how the site works. We did, and here’s what we think -

Great visual appeal, if your browser doesn’t crash

A MyWindow profile is like an about.me page, only with a lot more options. Instead of a cover photo, which most social networks have, the background of a MyWindow page is a video about you. Apart from this, a MyWindow profile has information about your

Creations (Digital Media that you’ve created) - Users can sell this on the platform as well Places you’ve been to (a mapview with pins on places you’ve been to) Inspirations (Media that you like) Wishes (A wishlist, which you can represent with media which you upload)

A unique thing about MyWindow is the curtain like sideways scroll which reveals information about the above mentioned categories. This is great from a features standpoint, but use it for sometime and some issues start to pop up. Here are some that we faced -

• Sometimes opening profiles slows down the browser significantly, often crashing the browser. 
• The videos are set to start as soon as you open a profile. Open more than one profile and you have a heady mix of many sounds from the various videos. (In our case, it was a Vinod Khosla interview, a Lady Gaga song and a Farhan Akhtar advertisement.) This again slows down your browsers.

On the users end

As a MyWindow user, you create and consume content from its homepage, which is called the Yoke, here. As you’re signing it, MyWindow asks you to choose your interests (Like Flipboard) and provides you people and content which match the interests that you’ve put up.

You can follow people or as it is called on MyWindow ‘Mark’ people. It also has a chat application where someone can ‘knock at your window’. You can filter content based on interest and people.

In essence, everything that a social network should have.

The Bad News...

There are many who will tell you that the era of the social network has gone. And lets be honest. We’re all too used to Facebook and/or Twitter, and using another social network to follow people and interests and it’s going to take a lot for a social network to acquire its users and get them to use it as well.

What has worked in the recent past are niche social networks (Like Instagram) on the mobile platform. While MyWindow isn’t niche, there is a mobile app in the works. It will be interesting to see how they bring such a feature heavy site onto mobile.

However, getting those users is where MyWindow will find the biggest challenge. And going by how other new social networks are faring, it is a steep, uphill struggle.

BUT...

The vision of the company is to build a great product. MyWindow reeks of out of the box thinking and a design sense that we haven’t seen in other social networks in the past. Maybe the platform might go through its iterations of change, but this looks like a team that can pivot well.

Lets wait and see how MyWindow performs in the days to come. We’ll keep you posted.

Request for a MyWindow invite here.