Rediff Connexions

Rediff Connexions is an India-based online networking portal. I’ve desisted long enough from mentioning the same on this blog because I did not believe it was a serious online “business” networking portal and leaned more towards social networking.

In the past few months, however, I’ve been hearing more and more about the portals and since I have been a registered member since their early days, I’ve re-visited and am glad to report that they’ve made much progress. They are definitely not in league with our usual portals like LinkedIn, openBC and even Ryze, but it’s the first sincere effort by an Indian portal to tap the online business networking crowd.

They’ve also got me featured on their main page [ which is another reason why I thought it would be a good idea to finally mention Rediff Connexions 😉 ]

While I’m not a fan of their interface, they could use some help with the design – in terms of functionality as well as aesthetics – they do allow the following basic functions:

• Creating your profile – with regular details concerning professional experience, interests etc.
• a basic mechanism to invite people to connect with you on the portal
• a basic mechanism to maintian your network, remove contact, send messages, keep track of contact details etc.
• Groups [ I haven’t used this function at all so I am not capable of reviewing just yet! ]

They also have a decent Search function, which helps you get in touch with other people on the network.
The main DashBoard page also gives tidbits of information about new members on the network, people who’s birthdays are coming up, total people on the network who are in the same industry as your own, etc.

One main issue on their website currently is that I am unable to find the page that will help me get to invitations and message that people have sent for me on Rediff Connexions! Only when I click on the link in their intimation e-mail am I taken to those pages – getting to them independently is a whole different ballgame – unless I save the specific URL of course.

Rediff Connexions is definitely a bold initiative, but they need to work a whole lot more if they want to become a serious player in the online business networking market. They are still in beta.