Technology As Innovator

Yahoo! just released Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam, the blogging platform-social networking hybrid that is expected to replace its Yahoo! 360.

The Vietnamese version is developed based on its HongKong counterpart, and many R&D activities are done in Singapore.

Additionally, Yahoo! is planning to open its office Vietnam, rather than managing remotely from Singapore like currently.

Overview functionalities

Generally, it takes current features of Yahoo! 360 and merge with functionalities that are common across many blogging platforms.

The server(s) is still located outside Vietnam.

No real innovation has been observed.

It’s worth mentioning that in recent years, Yahoo! has focused more on branding, while Google on products and Facebook on user experience. Result?

About Vietnam market.

There are now 20 million Internet users in Vietnam, most of whom are young people under 25.

The Vietnam market is the 5th largest market of Yahoo!

Vietnamese Internet users depend heavily on Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! 360. The number of Yahoo! 360 accounts is approximately 2 millions, comparing with 5 millions users of this service worldwide.

Yahoo! is trying hard to maintain its user base and seek to acquire even more by launching its new platform.

Yahoo!’s competitors in Vietnam

Social networking

Facebook is increasingly spreading in the English-speaking, tech-savvy communities.

yobanbe from Vina Game

tamtay, a MySpace clone

Vietnamese cyworld

faceViet, a Facebook clone

Blogging

Some, frustrated with the buggy 360, have switched to other blogging platforms including blogger, opera, multiply. A small number of techies endorse WordPress

The local ngoisaoblog service

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Addendum: my initial feedbacks to Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam team.

Improvables

1. How do I communicate with friends who don’t read Vietnamese with Yahoo! 360plus?
2. No option to return to Blog Homepage but only Master Yahoo! 360plus Homepage
3. No feedback option
4. No FAQs
5. Font size not consistent in Firefox
6. Translation
7. I choose two-column theme with the hope that width of the main column will be larger. However, my assumption was wrong, as width is still fixed.
8. Some formatting HTML tags don’t work. i.e. headings
9. Only jpg images are allowed.
10. No auto-invite option.
11. Javascript not supported

Improvements from Yahoo! 360

1. In Firefox: Enter gives paragraph break, not line break as in Yahoo! 360 (like that of WordPress)
2. Favorites are displayed directly in the blog page.
3. Person tagging in the entry (like that of Facebook)
4. HTML for comment (like that of WordPress)
5. Extraction (like that of WordPress)
6. Edit time for entries (like that of WordPress)
7. Draft (like that of WordPress)
8. Categories (like that of WordPress)

When inviting friends to an Event…

…or to join a Group:

Without any avatar,

Without any suffix,

Without any link to see the person’s profile,

How am I supposed to distinguished friends of mine who have the same screen name?

Facebook just rolled-out its Chat function to a few networks. Facebook Chat supports Unicode and basic emoticons. Initially, it also provides Feeds and Online Status.

If you want to use Facebook as your primary channel of communication and networking, now you no longer need to reply on other IM services to chat real-time with your connections. Additionally, Yahoo! Messenger only allows 300 friends, while that of Facebook is much greater.

Facebook is joining the IM market with their huge user base in the back. More advanced features will be launched soon.

From Facebook Blog

This week marks the launch of Facebook Chat—a new way for you to communicate with your friends in real-time. The Wall and Inbox have been the primary ways to communicate, but when more immediacy is necessary—for example when making plans for lunch in half an hour or arguing over a foul call in the NCAA tournament—they might not be enough. Chat aims to fill this gap.

We’ll be rolling this out slowly going forward, but fairly soon you’ll notice our new Chat bar at the bottom of your browser—no installation or assembly required. From this bar you can view your list of online friends and open conversations with any or all of them. There’s no need to setup a “buddy list.” Unlike the Wall or Inbox, the messages are delivered and displayed to your friend as soon as they’re sent, so you should expect a response right away and without any page loading. Of course, Chat has to play nice with the rest of the Facebook experience. You can collapse conversations to get them out of the way, and go offline if you don’t want to use Chat at all. Chat is there when you want it, and tucked away when you don’t.

We’re working on pulling other features of the site into the real- time Chat world. Your notifications will now arrive in the Chat bar, and while chatting you’ll see your friend’s Mini-Feed activity thrown into the conversation, as it occurs.

Before we jump head-first into this new real-time approach to Facebook, it’s worth spending some time thinking about privacy. Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there’s a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don’t want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we’ll continue to make sure that you are in control.

Chat is by no means a new concept, as instant messaging systems have been around for over a decade. But just as other features on Facebook have allowed friends to communicate more efficiently than before, we hope Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly.

More link: Facebook Chat Help