Launch of IndiStream

Today, we're super happy to announce the launch of IndiStream:

http://www.indiblogger.in/indistream/

How did this feature come about?

• We had an awesome blogger meet at Mumbai.
• Mumbai's bloggers had such a hangover they decided to continue the discussion on Twitter, using #inditweetmeet. This was spearheaded by Sneha and Abhinav (Has he changed his twitter id?).
• Thanks to #inditweetmeet, we decided that we need to support this and make it official. We just didn't know how - at the time.
• We realized that #inditweetmeet can be abused - by non IndiBloggers and spammers. (There was a non-indiBlogger spammer who even showed up, in person, at our IndiBlogger meet! )
• If we use #inditweetmeet to chat, our followers and blog readers will not like so many updates on their twitter timeline.  We needed to keep the majority of the discussion "within the family" - and only tweet what was relevant to our followers.
• There have been several requests on the forum for a chat feature. The one that made us sit up and think was this one, where it was pointed out that the forum was losing it's relevancy. The forum was built to be a relatively timeless resource of well-researched information - where bloggers can come, get help, find the information they need, and more importantly - help others. As of now, the forum is used for everything - online blogger meetups, hellos, "how are yous", and good natured abuses. So the decision was obvious - seperate the "chat" from the "resource". Of course, there will be an overlap, but we do hope it would be less!
• IndiBlogger has too many things going on, especially on the forum - personally, it's added at least 6 extra tabs to my usual browsing experience. It kills me when I see so many suggestions for IndiBlogger going unattended to by Myself and the team. We really hope to clone ourselves soon.  On that note, the closest thing we have to cloning is actually making babies, so...
• Anwin, one of our co-founders, had a baby boy a few days ago. His name is Ayden, but we call him the IndiBaby. Anwin's wife Nafisa happens to be our blogger meet coordinator.
  
  There's nothing more inspiring than a tiny clueless kid who's looking at you for inspiration. 

We Blog, Therefore We Have IndiStream! Hope you all like it folks! As always, give us suggestions, bugs found, and feedback!

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P.S. - This is a tribute from our team to everyone on this forum: December 2007, we listed a short bunch of abusive words to filter all inputs posted here. Almost 3 years later, we've never, ever had to add another word - nor has the abusive filter ever been used for it's intended purpose. That's something that can be said only for Indian Bloggers. We love this place - you guys rock.