Vebbler: An ambitious effort to create a personal network for people to have meaningful conversations
When 23 year old Sahil Bhagat got in touch with us with a request for Vebbler, I thought the same when anyone who’d first visit the site would think: “Another social network?” Well, yes it’s a personal network developed with a mission to create a world where people can have more meaningful conversations. Nowadays we often hear a complaint that social networks are getting cluttered and they aren’t personal anymore. This is the very grievance Vebbler is trying to alleviate.
Founded by Sahil Bhagat, Vebbler is currently a team of 7 based out of Mumbai. Sahil previously started Frogster, a social network for causes for which he raised angel investment from Delhi based Arctic Holdings. Frogster didn't work out as per plan and Sahil had a few lessons which he has tried to employ with Vebbler.
Vebbler launched into beta a couple of weeks ago and has seen good traction. The company claims to have 1800+ registered users, people from 44 countries and 348 cities already. I gave the network a spin and features are pretty easy to latch on to:
- Clubs (for personal sharing): Clubs allows a user to add a person into different layers, such as friends, family, workmates and acquaintances- the core feature of Vebbler.
- Followers (for public sharing)
- ~Wavetags: Move over Hashtags.
- Search: Searching interests, photos, waves and conversations around a particular topic.
There are a few UX flaws like pressing the arrow keys takes me back to the top where there is a how-to-use-vebbler slideshow but all these can be cleared up.
The main utility is to keep your network personal and there are a few other features but primarily it takes on some very big players with minimal chance of striking gold. The biggest challenge for Vebbler as with any other network now coming up is if the users are willing to get acquainted with another network and migrate or add one more site to their list for visiting every day.
Next on the product roadmap at Vebblr is Location Based Sharing, automated & custom clubs and more features around photos. Vebblr is a nifty tool and the team can surely build a good consumer product but I’m not sure if I’d be pulled to Vebblr again and again.
Website: Vebblr
