Koo should aim higher

And provide a “civil, liberal” alternative to Twitter.

Koo is now pitching itself as an alternate to Twitter in India. The recent scorning of government’s orders by Twitter has provided momentum for Koo with many government ministers moving to it.

However, my take is Koo is not strategically positioning itself well. Its unimaginative and cheap rip-off name and logo apart, positioning itself as a “Make in India” solution or as a law-abiding Indian entity will only give it limited traction which also risks dying out. Social media is about network effects, and Koo should upgrade its strategy as a “Made for the world” solution.

Below are some strategic features Koo should look at.

1. Koo’s mobile number based authentication has the ability to reduce drastically the filth that has now become quite pervasive on Twitter. Trolling, bot accounts can get reduced because of this.
2. While Koo is going to make email-based login available, it will be nice if it can provide a semi-verified badge to logins that are mobile number based. This means, Koo can have three categories of users — fully verified, semi-verified, unverified.
3. Provide ability for users to allow replies from one of these categories.
4. Similarly, tune the trending algorithm so that it provides weightage to verified accounts, and also reduce the weightage exponentially with the velocity of the tweets from an account.
5. While doing all these, Koo should make sure that it follows global best practices on privacy and security, and not limit itself to a low bar that can pass off in India.

Twitter is so engrossed in its’ own ideological discourse that it is missing several problems with the platform that can be easily solved. Koo has an opportunity to position itself as a civil, yet liberal alternate to Twitter. It should not miss this opportunity and limit itself as an Indian Twitter rip-off.