(From top) A grab of the social networking site www.friendomania.com, and its founders Sumit Gupta, Deepak Kumar and Praphul Kumar. Telegraph pictures

How’s this for an easy quiz. Name a social networking site whose name starts with an F.

Surprisingly, the answer is not Facebook, but the indigenous friendomania with a small f. And three geeks in their early twenties with roots in the capital — Praphul Kumar, Sumit Gupta and Deepak Kumar did their schooling at Ranchi — can lay claim to being the Indian version of Mark Zuckerberg.

Sumit and Deepak studied in Kairali School, while Praphul went to St Thomas’ School, but became fast friends at the tuition classes.

Eight months ago, Praphul, Sumit and Deepak developed what they claim is “India’s first social networking site friendomania”. And Alexa, a global monitoring agency that keeps tabs on the popularity of online sites, has ranked it 15,900th among 12 crore existing websites. Google, Facebook and YouTube are the top three sites.

In fact, the three friends, scattered across India now — Praphul is job-hunting in Gurgaon after completing his BTech from Bhubaneswar-based Kalinga Institute of industrial Technology, while Sumit and Deepak are final-year BTech computer applications students at AMC College of Engineering, Bangalore, and Jaipur Institute of Technology, respectively — kept in touch for years with social networking sites such as Orkut and Facebook.

The trio doesn’t claim to be geniuses. But while using the interactive apps (short for applications) on the globally popular sites, they felt some things were lacking.

“We loved Orkut. Then, when Facebook came, we felt it was even more exciting. But then we got bored as we felt the features were limited. So I decided to start a site just for fun,” said Praphul.

The three pooled in their brains and tinkered with codes to put in more gaming apps, an auto translation app, the facility to have free mini websites within s single user account, file sharing and doodling on the chat window and so on.

“We just decided to have some fun. But then we realised that our subscriber base was increasing. So then, we gave it a soft launch in April and again in September with added features,” said Praphul.

He said that the greatest excitement was seeing the Alexa rankings climb up.

“First our ranking was 4,00,000, then it upped to 26,000 in a week. Now, the latest ranking is 15,900. It’s an amazing improvement and that too without much promotion done by us,” said Praphul.

The geek unabashedly says that friendomania is for everybody. “For instance, our option to give a free and fully functional website facility within a user account can help a small shopkeeper or businessman to customise it according to his needs. Just log in and get going,” said Praphul.

And as a tribute to Facebook, users can log in to the site by clicking the My Facebook tab to browse its newsfeed.

Up next, the team is mulling the commercial viability of the site. “In fact, some US firms have asked us to sell them the site or design a similar one. But we shall register ourselves soon. We created friendomania for fun, never imagining it would click. It’s a great feeling,” said Praphul.