Is making clones bad?
swapspace: It depends on what he means by cloning. Speaking from an Indian perspective, there is a horde of vanilla Indian social networking sites which are just floundering. On the other hand, there is bazee.com, an ebay equivalent which was bought by ebay and is now known as ebay.in. There are other startups similar to US ones in travel, mobile payments and so on, which are doing pretty well.I guess it's not just about localization in terms of language but also about making related offline services available, which is sometimes not feasible for the original site(s) to do all over the world, at least fast enough.