The online social networking space has seen a large number of initiatives in the last five - six years. And websites like Ning provide a platform to create your own social network around particular interests or objects.

Commonfloor intends to be a networking platform with a difference to bring out the community aspect of apartment complexes, condominiums, conclaves, living spaces in big cities, to the fore. A number of Indian startups like bigadda.com, bharatstudent.com, gokut.com, legaladda.com, fropper.com, minglebox.com, revvs.net, muziboo.com, sirfdosti.com, smsgupshup.com, yaari.com are already lined up, some with building networking around social and friendship aspect like minglebox, yaari, sirfdosti and some with the intent of building networking around objects like legal needs, student needs, musical needs, F1 sporting needs and so on. Commonfloor wants to be a platform of choice for the people living in apartment conclaves. There is hardly time or reason for people living in such spaces in metro cities. One way to socialize, keep track of things happening around, solve eachother’s problems is to network efficiently, is to use technology the right way.

That’ what commonfloor claims and implements. The users need to have a profile to begin with, listing out factors like residential status, interests, hobbies and generals. A dashboard acts as a simple gateway once logged in, to keep track of various messages and updates. Then there is the notice board feature that provides space for putting up posts about selling and buying stuff, flagging important ones and viewing notices by categories. The residents can be searched block wise or locality wise in conclaves where there may be large number of inhabitants. The users can create their own communities known as groups based on shared interests, professions, hobbies etc. A separate listing is created for events happening in the condominiums. Both past, current and future events can be easily tracked.

Another features is a question and answer section that can be used to clarifying questionnaires. There is an additional panel to host sharing and borrowed things, the residents can use the same to simplify sharing physical things when in need. Also present are opinion polls to capture mass opinions. The complaints section lists out problems to be solved either common or specific ones. And integrated local information feature presents mapping functionality to make it easy to find places of interests, shops, malls, playing fields etc in the resident locality. With pretty good elements that are specific to the community building, community favoring needs of condominiums, Commonfloor has positioned itself well in a growing market of Indian property and real-estate. The positioning and timing is kind of perfect for expanding amongst suitors!