@dvocable

Web18 seems set to become the destination for your social bookmarking needs, video and music sharing, online travel portal, start up page, feed aggregation, and emails. Their latest venture, In.com, so apparently, is a huge effort in this direction. If the name, targeting all those who yearn for small email addresses, doesn’t strike you, then check out the features. These guys must have figuring out hard all this while on what kind of online sites tick well with the masses. And when they did, they assembled all of them together in one. So now you have your Digg, YouTube, Gmail, MakeMyTrip, Netscape, Zapak, and JukeboxAlive under one domain. That’s the story.

Do I like it? Definitely. In fact, I dare say this is finally a web 2.0 site from India after a long time that I honestly like. The design and look are neat. The music and video streaming is fast even on my dialup. The email service is with a whopping 10 GB space and I particularly find it quite thoughtful that they have introduced folders, made compose editor or for that matter every mail that you read open in a new tab. The inbox page is clean and they don’t insert any ad on the footers of emails that I send to my acquatntances, like our so big Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail do. Plus, In.com is a 2-letter good name (it has supposedly costed Web18 2 crores) to have an email with and being new, you can have all the mayank, sita, teena, and what not @in.com, instead of going for the tenna20008 type usernames.

In.com doesn’t have to worry about the news. They aggregate it from other sites. Maybe many people would prefer that instead of having one publication house to read the news from.

What the site lacks is the functionality in some areas. Site navigation can still be a pain. if you venture somewhere as when you are adding your feed or reading a feed, you cant find the go-back buttons so easily. You cannot move back to any part of the site from your inbox.

Would I prefer In.com over gmail? Unlikely , but it can definitely become my second best and I can close down my Rediffmail, Yahoomail, AOL, and Hotmail.

I hope they keep the site clean and don’t insert ads like there’s no tomorrow, something so characteristic of web18 sites.

Final words: This site is here to stay and so watch out, Indiatimes and Rediff. I cannot yet start comparing it feature by feature with the biggies like Gmail and YouTube, that won’t be fair, but I think web18 has got it right.

For users like us, all I can say is grab your ID before anybody else does (provide your mobile phone number not email for instant invite code on the site) and the ad campaign starts.