Five days ago, I came up with a blog post criticizing Wlinkster's methods of spamming Zuck's posts and generating more hatred towards their cause rather than appreciation. The post took two or three days to get high up in the Google Search (after all, I write pretty sincerely), and if you search 'Wlinkster', that post comes in the third position. Not bad, huh?
Naturally, the Wlinkster guys pinged me on Facebook (apart from the bogus comments on the blog). Ok, I have made a huge "Contact Me" box on the left panel which is really hard to miss and hence, it must have been easy for them to get to me. Sagar Rana and Aviral Kelkar, the co-founders of Wlinkster were on the other side, when I decided it was time to include the cranky dude, who was my co-author, as well. Hell, I was so scared- in case you don't get the sarcasm.
I would take you through each and every point in the conversation and try to explain my stand. I am doing this not because I am answerable to them, but because I feel that my readers (I am nearing a million hits now) must know the truth.
First, I came up with the previous post not owing to any affiliations, but because I write on everything out there. I criticized them for their unnecessary publicity, poor web designing but concluded commending their spirit coming up with this at such a young age.
Now, the first point of the conversation was their high Alexa rank. Their global rank as of now is around 120000 and India rank is just over 9500. That's good. But what they fail to understand is that as you get higher in the rankings, getting higher gets exponentially tough. Didn't get me? Let me rephrase it. The increase in number of clicks that would require you to jump from 10000 to 9000 is far higher than the number which would take you from 100000 to 90000!
The next point raised in the chat was by Aviral, and let me quote,
if ur university taught u something then why dont u make ur own website rather than writting on ur blog. N most importantly ur TEMPLATE BASED BLOG. look u cant even make a blog of ur own so u better stop judging people u can only use a template...
Was it meant to be a personal attack? I wonder at how many levels that is wrong. What Mr Aviral fails to understand is that I am a much better web developer than he previously thought. A blog is a blog, and a blog has a template. What is so bad in it? Why should I sit and code a blog when there is Google working on Blogger, or the open source WordPress out there already? I promptly gave him a link to ThinkTank (me being a part of the team that developed it), and that shut him up quite good. What I should also have done is give him a link to this answer on Quora where I explain my work in the past year and a half.
Let's come back to the next interesting point. I asked them what was the whole point of this conversation and this is what they come up with. I quote them again.
just want to tell you what we are doing for india <--- the point of this conversation, the whole post about us. a social network from INDIA. india is a developing country. and it need to be in the top most IT sectors in the world. development is a course, its a process, u cant reach there just in a go. and only we have the potential to stand india there.
I am sorry. I didn't know about the bigger picture. I didn't know you guys are working for a developing country like India to improve. Unemployment, poverty and hunger are going to be eradicated soon. I apologize, really! BTW, don't we already have Bharat Student? Since you guys talk Alexa rank, their India rank is 885 right now. And then, there's Fropper, with an Indian Alexa rank of 2500.
They did give me a list of blogs who had talked about them in a more positive sense and I present the list to you!
This site just copy pastes most of the info Rana and his associates, and contains the same broken English. In fact, the author didn't even remove the formatting when copy-pasting from Facebook.
Nothing about Wlikster is mentioned except the total number of hits. Are you kidding me?
It just copy pastes the Alexa information with the same info on Wlinkster that is found everywhere.
Gives Wlinkster a 4/5 rating based on a single line review. You must be kidding me, right?
Blog not found.
Blog not found.
That being said, it seems my post is the only legitimate on the whole wide world which gives a proper review of Wlinkster and the founders choose to ignore it as a defamatory article. How would you call it defamatory if everything I have mentioned is true? Moreover, why would I defame something which doesn't have any fame yet?
They asked me take my post down because they didn't like it, to which the cranky dude promptly replied that it would be fair only if they take their site down because we didn't like it.
They ended the conversation with "We won" just because I left the conversation. I don't see how you should be so happy at it. I am just a puny little critic. Don't you think they should rather work on their site?
They asked me take my post down because they didn't like it, to which the cranky dude promptly replied that it would be fair only if they take their site down because we didn't like it.
They ended the conversation with "We won" just because I left the conversation. I don't see how you should be so happy at it. I am just a puny little critic. Don't you think they should rather work on their site?
Anyways, it's really up to you how you decide to take the criticism and work on it to make your site better. I would be very happy if one day Wlinkster becomes a big social network and I would gladly write another post on how I was wrong. Till then or until you have something better to say, please refrain from pinging me again.
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