7. Vakow

Vakow is really cool. It started as a sms forwarding engine and is slowly transforming into a microblogging engine like Twitter.

There are a few things about Vakow that strike me as remarkable like the design, attention to detail, feature completeness (without being too bloated), witty system messages. Design of this site is pretty funky. There are some real gems in the design for instance the vertical tab on the left margin of the screen(in middle of the page) which says feedback. A very simple yet effective design.It shows they are serious about feedback and want to hear from their users. They use a normal 10 digit mobile number so smses to the system are cheap. With mobile penetration being so huge in India, I think there is a big market for microblogging.

However they could have done somethings better like recently launched a V2.0 of the site and added microblogging platform which in my view seems patch work and they should have a clean separation between SMS forwarding and blog stream. Marketing also needs some effort and a little more viral elements and ease of use would make it more popular. Things like not allowing forwarding of SMSes until it get 2 hands up is too restrictive and should be done away with. Similarly, option to allow users to register via mobile is a must have. They should also lookout for scaling issues as it has started to feel a little sluggish these days.
Anyhow, with around 500 posts a day the site is becoming popular by the day and soon should start making waves in Indian youth community.