We are pleased to announce that Redanyway has been selected for incubation at iAccelerator.

iAccelerator is an intensive startup incubation program in which the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad supports ICT based startups to help them become world class technology companies. Modeled after the highly-popular YCombinator, iAccelerator will be conducted at IIM Amhedabad over four months starting 1st May’09.

Redanyway will be shifting its base to the IIM Ahmedabad campus for next few months. We shall keep updating our blog with all the action from the iAccelerator.

First of all we apologize to keep you waiting so long for our new blog post. We realize that there has not been much action and very few updates in the past few weeks. But we have been very busy to enhance your experience with Redanyway.

In the next few days (and blog posts) we shall uncover the latest happenings @ Redanyway and reveal what’s in store for you going ahead in near future!

Redanyway has been ‘TechCrunch’ed!

See here.

We thank TechCrunch and we welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Post your feedback here, http://getsatisfaction.com/redanyway

-Team Redanyway.

Yes, it has been long time since we have been under the hood and finally its time to delineate the vision we have in mind for Redanyway.

Redanyway is a distributed social network, where your personal website or blog is your profile page. We provide different widgets, plugins and services to help you convert your personal website into your profile page and integrate Redanyway social network into it, as tightly as possible, but without compromising the power of publishing you have. This is supposed to help you bring all the advantages of a social network to your blog and gain better attention to it, with more traffic and better reader engagement.

(Note: From now on I will be using the terms ‘personal blog’ and ‘personal website’, interchangeably.)

The Problem

If you had or have been maintaining a personal blog for few months, you’d know that it is difficult to gain attention to your blog especially for first few months and for that matter there is also no good direct way to connect your blog to your friends and family. And on the other hand if you remember your experience on setting-up your profile on social networks like Facebook or MySpace, it not only takes a few minutes, but you also make many more contacts, which you haven’t even thought of, in first place. Here you can also consider experience of being on one of the social media networks like YouTube or Flickr, where its very easy to get attention on your content. You can get high page views or rankings very easily and more than that the social activities like commenting, gaining more contacts etc. are also observed more on the social networks than on the blogs. These things really motivate and encourage you to publish more, better content and importantly keeps the two-way communication.

But, we also cannot forget the power we enjoy over the personal websites, that is only limited on these social networks. We can completely personalize our websites and publish without any rules, more critically we can also completely monetize our content and capitalize on it fully.

Till now, somehow we couldn’t leverage the advantages of both, social networks and personal website.

Redanyway: The Solution

We here at Redanyway consider of utmost important to solve these two problem and provide a single solution, which combines the advantages of both worlds. So, we are coming up with a distributed social network where the whole web is a social network and your personal website will be your profile page. You will be able to include your friends and followers list in your blog. Users will be able to add you to their friends list, follow and favorite your content, chat with you and fellow subscribers etc., all from your personal blog. You will also be traveling to other profiles on the web with a single personal profile setup on Redanyway and one centralized registration eliminating the need of providing your identity every time you browse different websites, giving you an experience of being on a single social network, even if you browse the web, without any boundaries.

Yet Another Social Network?

We realize that why you might hate to join yet another social network, but here is how its different. Till now on most of the social networks you created only person-to-person relationships, keeping your contacts at one place and making communication, fun and easy. But while we were thinking of making a distributed social network, we realized that how it’s important to create person-to-content relationships, so we are introducing a ‘follow’ relationship, which is a unidirectional relationship with the content. This also eliminates the need of befriending anyone, if you are only interested in the publisher’s content. It also drastically reduces the noise on the network. You can easily track all the content you’re following from ‘Redanyway Dashboard’, in addition to friends’ activities and updates.

Until now, we had to grab the ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’ feed of a blog and add it to some feed reader to keep track of the content on that blog. Let’s face it, most of your readers don’t even know what RSS is! More importantly, as a publishers you cannot identify with your readers who are subscribed to your RSS, who are supposed to be your most loyal readers. This certainly doesn’t help flourish a good relationship between you and your readers, and makes blogging less fun. So, with Redanyway you will be able to cut-out the RSS in-between and be able to take blogging mainstream.

So to speak, the relationships you will be creating on Redanyway will be completely new and will help you in your blogging experience.

So, what do you say? Shall we paint The Web Red?

We are not sure about the storm, but for sure its going to be an end to our long silence. For past past couple of months, we’ve been really busy developing Redanyway and make it really valuable for users. We are done with our alpha testing now and preparing for our private beta launch. So expect the next posts on explaining what is Redanyway and what it holds in store for you. Also keep following this blog or our twitter account http://twitter.com/redanyway to get early invite code to our private beta launch.

Today, an interesting study came to light, posted by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb about the Social Media. We knew some of the similar numbers through different sources when we actually started research on Redanyway i.e. couple of months back. We always have to take these numbers with a grain of salt, but it’s good to have more of these numbers to strengthen the argument. Following data, published by Universal McCann’s “Media in Mind” study, interests more to us,

• 1 out of 10 U.S. adults now publish blogs (up from 5% last year)
• 1 out of 5 18-34-year olds publish blogs (up from 10% last year)

(You should also check out more of this data and studies published by Universal McCann’s it’s very interesting)

It’s awesome that how number of bloggers have increased nowadays and we think people are now taking it more seriously than ever. But, this study also fails to take under consideration the retention of these bloggers and frequency of the posts. While we were researching we found many of the studies showing that about 50% of the bloggers abandon their blog in a month or two due to many reasons. Of them following ones are very common,

1. I was not getting very many comments to my blog posts
2. There were too few subscribers
3. Did not notice any increase in traffic to the website
4. Coming up with regular, new content was too much effort
5. Did not see a clear way to promote our products and services in the blog.

(Source: NewsVend)

I think most of you will agree with the above reasons. It’s really hard to promote your blog and engage your readers. And we here at Redanyway are trying to solve the exact same problem and not just blogging, but with any of your website. It’s important to bring social element to your website and there should a structured service or platform available to empower that. Twitter is great example of that. It gave us a great platform for microblogging letting us easily ‘follow’ (or you can say subscribe) user’s/blogger’s feed, discover new feeds or socialize in easier and better way. And now this platform is so extensible (I am not talking about the twitter outages ) that nowadays many things are possible to make out of it. Imagine what would have happened if we would have microblogged on our own, it would have been horrible to promote or make your friends or others to follow it. We think more or less exact thing has happened to blogging and it’s getting more and more harder to find new subscribers or follow new good blogs on the net.

We here, at Redanyway respect bloggers very much, we think that it’s a form of a natural human expression. We always recommend you to have a blog to express yourself and not just blogging but also to have all media like photostream, videostream at one place as a your expression . But, of course all this with less hassle of spreading this to your friends or followers and we at, Redanyway strive to find you solution for this.

Internet today is fraught with social networking websites and community platforms. Each of them is trying to attract the users by offering different features. But when we look around, there are not many ‘successful’ SNWs .The reason being, not many of them actually offer you any unique feature.

We expect less customization: Why are we satisfied with what a SNW or a platform has to offer us and limit ourselves to the constraints they put on the way we interact socially? Why are we expecting less from the web when it has endless possibilities?

We expect less (read ’no’) branding: The content that users bring along with them to a community platform or a SNW add to the value of these platform. This makes Flickr: ‘the destination for best photos’ or Youtube: ‘the place to find great videos’. What about the branding of the user? Well, he/she is a ‘mere quality enhancer’ and a ‘mere content provider’ to these sites who may even has to pay for these platforms!

We expect less (read ’no’) money: Most social networking sites have ad-based revenue model in which they earn money by selling ad spaces on each page. So every page (including any user’s profile page) is being sold by these SNWs to ads. Now to make this model work these SNWs rely on the users’ content to engage other users. Interesting! So my video with some friends having a wild vacation on the beach is ideal for these SNWs to make money. I wonder why I am not getting paid for my content or for being popular and driving more traffic to my profile page?

We need to change the way we ‘are’ on the web. We should not be ‘mere providers of value and quality’ or ‘providers’ for that matter. We should keep our content and still get the due credit for its value. This can only be achieved when we start differentiating ‘platform/tool providers’ and the ‘content/quality providers’ and start appreciating them for who they are.

Expect more! Demand more! Let’s paint the web RED.

Here, begins the official journey of Redanyway. This is our first startup with three founding members i.e. me, Rohan and Sujay. Even though we made a few small attempts before, this is our first full-fledged startup. An attempt of launching a Go-karting track in Pune tops that chart and please don’t ask me, where all that came from.

Our story goes back to more than five years from now. We have been friends since our college days, have shared many ‘first’ moments and this is one of them. We had very interesting journey so far on Redanyway, going back and forth and dropping the ’s’ from the name is one them. It all began back in India with an idea, in an attempt to help the whole web. Everything else then just followed, like an application to Techstars, then getting shortlisted only to be put in the alternate list and finally getting here in Boulder. Yes, there is another interesting story behind how we landed here, but that’s for later or may be not. To say it in less words, we had a short stint in Techstars, we learned a lot and we really thank David and Techstars for that.

We have now begun on this with a very strong belief and excitement. At this moment, I cannot divulge much details about Redanyway, but I can assure you there is something in it for you. Me and my friends will be sharing moments and experience of this beautiful journey from time to time with you and also giving out all the product updates on this blog. So hit the subscribe button on the right.

You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/redanyway or mail us at info(at)redanyway(.)com