Twenty-one year old Sunil Chaulagain has been working on his online project for a year and a half and as of two months ago, he launched Meropost.com. [break]
Since launching, the site has already hooked close to 18,000 users and with a list of attractive features, the list is sure to grow.
“We’ve taken a lot of ideas from various social networking sites and we’ve added our own,” says Sunil who is in his fourth year of studying Computer Engineering at Kantipur Engineering College.
In adopting ideas from existing sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and MySpace to name a few, Meropost boasts some of the more popular attributes of each site in one place.
“We added ‘Follow’ like Twitter because reposting gets a lot of flow.” The idea which is the base of Twitter has worked in Meropost’s favor, “A lot of news gets passed on there, if there’s breaking news it’s immediately posted on Meropost too!” Sunil says.
Borrowing from Myspace, users of Meropost are able to personalize and change the background on their profile. “You can’t change your look on Facebook, but youth like to have their own background and they can do that on Meropost,” informs Sunil.
Although heavily relying on ideas from other sites, Sunil isn’t worried about copyright issues, “Not even Facebook or Twitter came up with this idea of networking sites, if you go back there’s hi5 and other sites too.
Meropost shares ideas but it’s not exactly the same,” he says. Besides, Meropost is under Tuchuk Services Pvt Ltd, New Baneshwor, which is registered and legally cleared.
Combining successful features from other sites like status updates and following, Meropost has taken ideas to the next level.
“On Facebook you can only post one picture at a time on your status, but on Meropost you can put up multiple pictures,” he says which the users utilize and enjoy.
Another tweak that is wildly popular is the ability to write status directly in Nepali. “You can click the option to post in Nepali and when you type the script will automatically change to Nepali,” Sunil says.
This commonly used feature even checks spelling and offers alternatives for mistyped words in the Devanagari script.
Meropost even has features that others lack, “We have chat rooms so Nepalis can network and talk to each other,” he shares.
The chat room, though available in places like Yahoo, have yet to make an appearance in popular networking sites.
“We have default chat rooms like ‘Timepass’ which the youth like, but users can create their own chat rooms and invite just friends or make it public.” These rooms all expire after 24 hours, as “too many chat rooms add unnecessary load.”
Going further, Meropost can also double as a blog if the user wishes. “Right now, you can write posts and send the url to people so even if you’re not a user, you can read and see the users profile if their privacy setting allows it.”
Through all of the ideas, Meropost is exceedingly cautious of privacy. “A lot of sites get misused, but so far there haven’t been complaints,” Sunil says of Meropost. “A lot of fake accounts are opened and people, especially girls, are harassed but users can have their account verified,” Sunil says.
To verify an account the user has to send identification be it a college ID card, driver’s license, or citizenship.
Though Sunil treads on grey legal grounds by asking for government certification, he’s not worried, “We don’t keep any of the ID, after we verify the account we get rid of it,” he says.
Once an account has been verified a green check mark appears on the person’s profile so there is no question about the authenticity of the profile.
“We hope that this will make Meropost safer,” says Sunil and contrary to previous reports, all users are not required to provide ID. According to him, “Many people want to have their accounts verified, to say ‘This is me, it’s my account!”
With regard to users of the site, half of them are in Nepal and the other half are in places like America, Japan, Korea, and Kuwait. Sunil gathers most of them are students, “Most of Nepal’s youth aren’t in the country now,” Sunil says, but they sure seem to be connected on Meropost.
By having a Nepali site with a heavily Nepali membership, Sunil hopes to help the country. “When we put ads on sites it’s a lot of money that is going elsewhere. Why not do that here? Why not have something of our own?” he questions..
But as of yet, the site has garnered little revenue, “We’re hoping to get ads soon, but till now we’ve only made about USD 100 from Google ads but hopefully that will change!” With the approximately Rs 400,000 that has been put into the site since its inception, it’s growing popularity and prime marking potential to the youth, it’s likely the investment will be worth it.
As for what’s next, Sunil says computers have held his interest since he was a child and with the help of marketing and managing members working with him on Meropost, this project and a software company are defiantly in the future.
As for the site he says, “We’re changing things and constantly trying to improve it. Try it, have a look, see how you like it!”
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