Blogging was tedious; microblogging is crisp, short and funky. How about a microblogging site with IM features integrated in it. That’s Kwippy for you. A micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network. Kwippy is the first of its kind from India. Started by a group of engineering enthusiasts, Kwippy does strive to differentiate itself from its counterparts.

Kwippy to be more precise is a nano blogging site. The messages are as short as your status messages of your IMs. The most exciting feature is that it could be integrated with your IMs, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.

Once you log into Kwippy, it asks the users to add Kwippy as a buddy to the IMs. The idea is to share with your Kwippy followers, what you share with your close buddies in IMs. And you need not strain much. The kwippy agent in your buddy list promptly delivers your IM status message to your Kwippy. And if you want to kwipp, you just need to buzz your kwippy agent. So you need not be logged into kwippy all the time.

In Kwippy you have followers and followees. People who are interested in you are your followers and people you are interested in are followees. Followers keep tab on what you do and you track the followees. Every time your followers or followees kwip, your kwippy agent notifies you on the IM.

Kwippy doesn’t steal your friends from the Yahoo! and Google messengers. Your followers are 100% kwippy citizens. However kwippy has plans to come up with an invite proposal.

This is what team Kwippy has to tell about them

What is in the name?

Kwippy is derived from the English word “Quip” which means a witty remark/saying.
Since many of us tend to write interesting quips as there status messages, we came up with Quippy; from there it evolved to its cuter version “Kwippy”

How & why did you come up this concept i.e. microblogging?

Well, we started as archiving IM status messages, supporting comments over them.
And some time into the app, all of us really started linking & got into microblogging. So we thought of doing a microblogging app as per our understanding and vision.

Who are your team members?

Mayank Dhingra, CEO Delhi College of Engineering graduate (2005 passout)

Dipankar Sarkar, CTO IIT-D product (2007 passout).

K.A Anand comes from IIT-B (2004 passout) with an experience varying from startups, freelancing to MNC’s.
Take a look at the Kwippy Team for a bit more

Who are your target segments?

Target segments would be existing microbloggers to start with and the average blogger & netizen going forward.

How different is Kwippy from Snockles or Twitter?

Well, the approach is more towards microblogging per se rather than communication. Plus, we intend to focus on one’s close friends by leveraging trust factor of one’s IM contact list. We are trying lots of new things- small & big. Also, instead of just forcing features on the users, we observe their usage patterns & trends; couple it with their demands/feedback to come up with new & relevant features.

What is your revenue model?

It would be easy to say that we are looking at an advertising model, but going forward we are planning to innovate and create other revenue streams as well.

How has the going been so far? And what are your goals for the next 2 years?

The going has been pretty interesting, we have had to understand the psyche of our users and are adapting to their needs. I would say that 2 years is a long time in this business; in a more immediate goal we want to be one of the top global micro-blogging applications in 6-8 months.

What challenges do you see for your growth?

The most obvious challenge is to keep the user involved with our product. As we are boot-strapped, infrastructure costs have to be kept at a minimum. As the technical lead, handling millions of users at the minimum budget is my challenge.

When do you see Kwippy being open to all?

We are very much usable, and we will release this month.

How do you plan to promote Kwippy?

Since, we are a boot-strapped; we are relying on word of mouth marketing & excellent customer service as marketing for now.