15 year old creates new social networking site

A class 10 student of St Aloysius High School, Mangalore has created a social networking website of his own. With this step, he has shaved off a good five years from the age at which Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, which is the biggest social media website in the world presently.

Prithvi Raj S Amin (15) launched his site ' youflik.cu.cc' on Monday through shared hosting and in 24-hours clocked 300 members. Zuckerberg was 20 when FB was created.
"Initially, I wanted an interactive site on music, but finally it turned out be an SNS,'' Amin said. His parents are bewildered with this development. "We knew he was a 'computer worm'. But this is something unimaginable to us,' said his parents Sujaya, an advocate, and Satish Kumar, a private firm representative.

"He is more of an introvert, does not have many friends and does not interact freely with others,'' says Sujaya. His teacher Santosh Lobo, who has taught him computer from eighth standard, said, "He speaks only when necessary. He has been a class topper and is the president of school IT club.''

Amin came in touch with computers in fifth standard. "One of my colleagues was replacing his old computers with new and one such computer landed home. He started working on this project during summer holidays,'' Sujaya said.

However, the new website is not without its own set of problems. Amin, who wants to pursue computer engineering in future, stated, "The first day, the server crashed as it could not handle 300 members. Now I have purchased a better server space which can support close to 50,000 members." He continued, "The site has small glitches and I am rectifying it on a day-to-day basis. This is a learning experience for me."

In his social networking site, one can chat by scribbling text using a mouse and has a blog section, plus interactive forum and polls section, apart from the usual frills that a social networking website has.