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By Tai, February 26, 2008 10:54 am

CyVee

News feed is implemented in CyVee

faceViet

faceViet launched new Beta with an interface different from that of Facebook.

They provide a rich Blogging platform and Music (both audio and video) embedding which are not present in Facebook core.

More reviews will come later soon…

yUp!

yUp! opens Beta, as previously reported.

yobanbe

yobanbe has been transferred to Zing domain yobanbe.zing.vn

Good move for boosting Zing’s Alexa rank.

yeah1

yeah1 grows from a forum to a community for teenagers. They aim at building a magazine and a TV channel for this market.

CafeF

Not a purely social networking site, but it’s worth mentioning that VCCorp’s CafeF has offered WordPress-powered blogging platform that specializes in Stock, and a Q&A channel at blog.cafef.vn

Any other interesting updates?

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By Tai, February 9, 2008 1:24 am

What is Yahoo! Pipes?

Pipes is a new mashup from Yahoo! that provides a GUI for building applications that aggregate Web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based applications from various sources. At the end of the process, user can choose to publish those applications.

The site works by letting users “pipe” information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified.

Tai Tran on Yahoo! Pipes

taitran.com/pipes

How to use Yahoo! Pipes

There are a series of videos to look at.

Firstly, please see the basics of Yahoo! Pipes

Other videos in the series:

• Yahoo! Pipes: Sorting, Filtering & Debugging
• Yahoo! Pipes: Yahoo! Search, Union & other people’s Pipes
• Yahoo! Pipes: Feedity
• Yahoo! Pipes: Yahoo! Buzz Through Flickr
• Yahoo! Pipes: Text Input & URL Builder
• Yahoo! Pipes: Custom module with For Each: Replace
• Location Input & String Concatenate

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By Tai, February 8, 2008 3:32 am

Tai Tran’s Lab: Technology As Innovator is back on its feet feed.

For you who subscribed through taitran.com/feed, feed items transmission has been suspended for a few weeks.

This was because my feed was exceeding the limit of 512Kb of FeedBurner.

I’ve fixed this issue, and items are coming through to your RSS Reader and/or mailboxes again.

Happy reading, my beloved readers.

Tai Tran

Comments (1)

By Tai, February 5, 2008 4:17 pm

yUp! silently opens Beta just before Tet holiday. My impression is that their efforts are spent to organize and provide most relevant information to users.

New features

Chatting

Talks has been added. It works the same way as that of a simple forum. This should allow more interactions between yUppers.

Large publish button

Security options

Security levels for user profile & homepage.

Design

The new layout is nice and neat with a lot of spaces to breath. The design concords perfectly with the mission of organizing information of the website.

Organizing information

Homepage

On its homepage, instead of throwing a lot of options in directories on users, only hottest ones are displayed: yUp’s Picks, Highest Rating.

yUp’s Picks and Highest Rating goes the same for Venues.

Events

Events tab makes it even further: they provide Week view of events. Navigation can be done chiefly through the calendar which is very convenient

Treeview

Categories on the treeview have been simplified to 4, which makes to less confusing for users.

Conclusion

Information organization is what makes success of Google. Can we say the same for yUp!?

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By Tai,

It is very likely that when you key in google.com to your browser, the page is redirected you to the localized Google page of the country where your IP is detected. Oh yeah, unless you’re in the US.

Enjoy this? Localization exists with the hope to bring you more relevant contents.

But what if you want the international or original version of the website?

At least I do.

Why?

• Because many terminologies when translated are difficult to understand.
• Because I want international contents.
• Because my browser may not display the localized language correctly by default.
• Or because I don’t understand the language on the localized page!

When I logged in to YouTube today, it redirected me to YouTube Taiwan tw.youtube.com! What? I am not Taiwanese. I speak a little Chinese but I wouldn’t want to surf web in Chinese. I checked my IP: still the Vietnamese ISP. There must have be some mistake in YouTube server. I hope it won’t last for long.

Then I went to Blogger with my cookies cleared and I had to set the language to English again.

Let’s try cyworld.com. Oh, it redirects me to CyWorld Vietnam cyworld.vn

Thanks goodness, Yahoo!, while hosting a Yahoo! Vietnam portal, doesn’t automatically redirect me to the localized page by default.

Tweak it

For Google, this command google.com/ncr brings you to the US version of Google.

For YouTube, I had to go to YouTube UK uk.youtube.com, a page with a language I understand.

I checked CyWord Korea out too by guessing the domain cyworld.co.kr. Ah ha, my guess was correct.

So what then?

Web service providers, I understand that localization is very likely to expand your market. However, not all users want a localized version. Please give your users the option to choose to go to the international version of your page. And when you do, please make it simple like Google did with a command.

Thanks