Launching of Connectfrens.com
17th Jan 2010

A social networking site developed by a Nepali has been launched and, like Facebook, looks to tap into the globally rising revenues of social networking sites by earning revenue from advertisements on its site.

Despite enrolling some international social networking websites like 'Facebook.com', 'Hi5.com' on a daily basis, majority of Nepalese users does not know where they were established from. But it should be different in case of another global social networking website called 'Connectfrens.com' because it is the first launched international social networking website from Nepal .

Krishna Karki says, 'Facebook has been successful to gather millions of people into one community. Why not using our own community portal?' Having said that, course tutor Krishna Karki developed a community portal with Facebook-like functional features. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. Users can choose fan pages according to their interests to connect and interact with other strangers. Users can set their profiles on private so as to prevent acquaintances from contacting them. Users can also set their profiles on public. This allows close friends to send messages and add the user as a friend. It lets users update their personal profiles to notify their close friends about themselves. They can also join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with their close friends. Public profiles also allow any stranger or acquaintance to contact the user which results in lack of privacy. Public profiles can be blocked by any user but private profiles cannot. The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner advertisements. Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.

The website has been developed without a teamwork which he blamed to be the main reason in taking much time. Student now a tutor, Krishna shares happiness as the website has already connected 600 users with 1.5 months of its launch. Though he has worked with open sources, Krishna thanks his friend Avinash Shrestha for his tremendous help. The website was developed earlier but could not launch it as its server connection had a failure. During this time, Avinash and Krishna has worked hard to overcome the problem. If facebook now have 300 million users worldwide, Krishna wishes to have such users in the website too.