Sumitr, a social network, launched recently. Pranav sums it up nicely.

It is good that they are trying something different. Perhaps a hybrid of Orkut and Geni? I like how they use Shahrukh Khan and Sushmita for default avatars. I don’t see much use of it in my life. However, 30+ Indians might see it as a helpful product. The whole element of a ‘parivaar’ connecting with another ‘parivaar’ over the Internet might be what they are looking for in their busy professional lives. They even provide you someone called ‘chote Mian’. It appears he is the family domestic helper on Sumitr. He addresses you as ‘Sir ‘ in the emails.

I think the product has a lot of scope to improve in usability and design. I’ll summarize things I noticed so far.

I can add or invite (using) my wife to join my Parivaar. However, I can’t invite my kids. What if someone has grownup kids who already have account on Sumitr?

A ‘kid’ can be married and live with spouse and children and is given his father or mother’s email address. He/she can change it though.

If I add a ‘son’ he can change his gender to male or female. On a second thought, this is possible, but highly unlikely. It was good to see that Sumitr figured out that my son was now my daughter.

Their ‘Tazaa Khabar’ or News feed is not really transaction based. I added my son, then he converted to my daughter. Sumitr says that I added a son, but shows that I added a daughter.

You can share the uploaded songs with your ‘mitr’ – Copyright violations?

When you create a baazi, if you change the winnings from Karma Koins (you get 100 by default) to Prizes – javascript switch didn’t happen.

They have tag cloud on the right nav. These are collective tags from the whole sumitr network. If you click these tags, they don’t show you anything most likely because the content that is tagged is inside privacy walls. It will be better if they display tag cloud from content where I have permission to view it. At least I can access those pages.

‘Yaadein’ or pictures is good. I uploaded a 12 MB directory and it went pretty well. They do need to work on some of the usability on it.

The whole design gives me a 1.0 feel. Not sure what is it, may be that background.

I don’t see myself using this product at least for now. I’d certainly visit it after a few months.