Two things have prompted this post.
There was some chatter, I think on Twitter, or perhaps on some blog, about how long one has been on “social media”. There were responses that mentioned periods like few months, 1 year, and going upto 3 years or so, on the outside. I did not participate in that chatter / discussion, because I felt funny. Have I been on Social Media for last 2-3 years, or last 12 years?? I know I would have raised a lot of eyebrows if I had mentioned 12 years there! So let me put up the facts here and allow you to decide. By the way, most of those people in that discussion must have still been in school 12 years back

The other reason that prompted this post was the slide that we put in our corporate pitch. We write there that:

Social Wavelength is a startup venture, incorporated in April 2009.

Social Wavelength though, has been many years in the making!

This is an effort then, to explain the idea of the “many years in the making” that we mention.

So here it is. Way back in 1997, when there were just a handful of websites in India, my first entrepreneurial venture, Homeindia.com, was one of those sites. And although later on, from 1998 onwards, it moved towards the e-retail space that was to be it’s focus thereafter (and continues to be, as on date, although the business is run by it’s new owners after we divested our stake in 2007), in those early days of 1997, Homeindia.com had a different focus. Here is a screenshot, without images, that I was able to pick up from archive.org:

Homeindia.com - VDIS Bulletin Board - 1997 - from archive.org

In 1997, the government of India, under Finance Minister, Mr. P. Chidambaram, had announced this Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) that enabled unaccounted income (from tax point of view) to be converted to accounted money. There were a lot of questions that people had, in this context. We had enabled a Bulletin Board on Homeindia.com, that time. While we had empaneled some experts to respond to people’s queries, but in addition to the experts, it was also open to any user, to respond to another user’s queries.

Over the few weeks when this scheme ran, there was large amount of interaction, and it became a veritable case of “user generated content” and a “community” of sorts, although those terms were not really fashionable those days!!

So did we run a Social Media application in those Web 1.0 days, in 1997? I think we did. What do you say?

In fact, over the next 9 years that we ran Homeindia.com, there were many other applications that we built and launched, which had high engagement with the users.

But to go back to the original two questions, I do believe that I have been engaging in ‘Social Media’ for a long, long time. And also on account of that 11+ years of hands-on experience in running these consumer facing online businesses, I have reason to state that Social Wavelength has been many years in the making!

Do you agree? As usual, welcome comments and feedback.

** For information of readers, I co-founded Homeindia.com in 1997-98. After the initial efforts in areas like VDIS, the site quickly regrouped to focus on offering services to customers outside India, including Non-resident Indians and others. Homeindia.com had the honor of being awarded “India’s Most Useful Website”, and subsequently took the onus of being “India’s Most Reliable Online Store”. I divested my stake in Homeindia.com in 2007. **

- Sanjay Mehta