Indian SNS Yaari.com changes for good

April 2009 Update: This post has lost relevance as Yaari has changed yet again.

An year ago, Aug 31, 2007, I had published a post reviewing the Indian social networking website yaari.com and had criticized the same for indulging in unethical practices of tempting users to share their email passwords and subsequently spamming all contacts in their address book with a Yaari invitation, under the identity of the user, without his/her knowledge.

You can read that old post here.

Recently I visited Yaari.com accidentally and was surprised to see that they have reworked on their site design and have changed for good. Unlike earlier, now one can sign up and explore the site without having to reveal email password. Even when you share email password, Yaari promptly fetches all contacts from address book and displays them in front of you, allowing you to select only those contacts to whom you want Yaari to send invitations to.

In other words, the revamped Yaari.com site addresses all the issues I had raised an year ago, effectively nullifying the concerns I had raised. I don’t have any more complaints on this site and felt obliged to keep my readers informed of the latest developments, so as to give a balanced view.

Please note that this post is for your information only and shouldn’t be treated as if I am recommending the site. I am still of the opinion that we don’t need half a dozen Social networking sites- Just one or two would be sufficient, as it is too tough to maintain so many profiles.

I haven't seen any offline promos of Yaari.com compared to rivals ibibo.com (Their balti ad never made sense but created enough brand awareness) and bigadda. Also not sure what market share Yaari has. Anyone active on these sites? I haven’t cared to create a profile yet. Anything unique there?

December 2008 updates: My reader Suresh comments, stating that Yaari hasn't given up its habit of spamming email contacts:

"Seems you are misguided. I recently opened an account on Yaari.com, it's true that now providing e-mail passwords are not required, but in case you want to check which of your friends are on Yaari.com, and accidentally if you provide your password of e-mails just to check your friends, the Yaari.com website stores their ID's and without your permission they send repeated invites to all your colleagues. This has happened with me on 21st Dec'08, and I reported this to Yaari.com and immediately de-activated my account. But later after 4 days of de-activating my account, they kept sending reminders to all my contacts asking them to join else I will feel bad. Since I also had official contacts in this list, this was annoying. This proves that yaari.com is still into spamming, do not know how they can survive with such un-ethical activities."

Similar: How orkut can be made a better place *

April 2009 Update: Looks like Yaari has gotten into unsolicited Matchmaking, sending its members their prospective matches...

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