JOIN US But high tariff and rate hikes of the mobile providers have made these netizens log on to their favourite social networking sites and other websites that offer free SMS and e-cards to send greetings and messages.
For mobile service providers festive occasions like Christmas, Diwali and New Year are boom time for business and they increase the rates for SMS and voice calls for even a short period of two days.
Major service providers in the country like Airtel, Vodafone etc have informed their customers of withdrawal of the free SMS and calls offer on December 31 and January 1.
Websites like way2sms, Indyarocks, 123greetings.com and Ibibo are cashing in on this opportunity and have seen a rapid increase in the number of users for the past few days, following Christmas.
Indiyarocks CEO Kalyan Manyam told Deccan Herald, “We are seeing a rise in the number of SMSes being sent from Indyarocks over the last three days. We provide 140 characters for user SMS while most other websites provide around 80 characters per SMS. We are expecting that more than 45 lakh SMS will be sent through our website on New Year’s Eve.”
According to information available from the website Google Trends India, a website hosted by Google which analyses a portion of hot Google web searches on New Year’s Eve, some of the hot searches were Way2sms, New year greetings, New year calendar 2010, Indyarocks, New year sms hindi , 160by2sms free sms, Sms messages etc. The graphs and statistics state most of these searches are being done from cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, and Pune where majority of the working youth are concentrated and internet penetration is high. Jayanth Babu, a student and a regular user of the site Way2sms.com said, “I use the site more often, but during the festive seasons all the major mobile service providers increase the SMS and call charges. And also at the peak hour on New Year Eve most of the mobile networks are jammed, so I prefer websites for sending my messages.”
Going forward the young netizens of India living in the digital world constantly prefer to be in touch with their friends round-the-clock in an asynchronous manner and like to share what they like and consume content recommended by their friends.