BharatStudent

» see bharatstudent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

BharatStudent launched in 2007, which lands inside the years I was finishing a degree in Turkey on an entirely different set of websites. I found the name on a list of dead Indian social networks, not in my own memory.

It came out of Hyderabad, from a company called Northgate Technologies, and the target was narrow on purpose: young Indians at home and in the diaspora, at the point in life where they are students or have just stopped being students. The site carried study material and exam sections alongside the ordinary social network parts. The Indian press described it as the third largest social network in the country.

That ranking is worth reading carefully. India in 2008 had Orkut on top by a wide margin, because Google had won that market early and held it there in a way it never managed anywhere else. Below Orkut sat a layer of local networks competing over the same students, and BharatStudent was one of the biggest of them. Third place in India was a real position and a fragile one.

By late 2009 the Indian tech press was already reporting the site was up for sale. In 2012 Northgate split its internet businesses out into a separately listed company. Neither of those is the behavior of an owner who thinks the asset is still growing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what Facebook did to it ~

Facebook opened up in India properly around 2010 and passed Orkut there in 2011. When the top of a market moves, the layer underneath it does not get to inherit anything. Everybody who left Orkut went to Facebook, including the students BharatStudent had been holding onto, because their friends were going and the entire value of a social network is where the friends already are.

The local networks went the same way inside the same window. Fropper went. So did BigAdda, which Reliance closed in 2011.

~ what the archive shows ~

There is no shutdown announcement for BharatStudent anywhere I can find. What exists is the Wayback Machine's record of the domain, and it turns out to be precise enough.

On 7 February 2019 the crawler got a normal homepage, a little over seven kilobytes, the same size it had been serving for years. On 10 March 2019 the same address returned a redirect, and it kept returning redirects for the rest of that year. The site died somewhere in that gap, inside about a month.

From the middle of 2020 the address answered again at seven or eight hundred bytes, which is a placeholder and not a page. Since 2023 it has been a permanent redirect pointing somewhere else. The domain does not answer at all now.

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