Technology As Innovator

“Within the next 5 years, Google Vietnam will have been Google Indochina.”

Read the article here: Google’s Advisor for Vietnam

That article was all the way back to early 2007.

We are now in August 2008 when we receive this big news: Google has officially set their foot in Vietnam.

Where is Google currently?

Currently, Google has 3 web properties standing in top positions in Vietnam market:

1. google.com.vn at #2, after yahoo.com
2. google.com at #7, after 4 local news portal
3. youtube.com at #10, after another 2 news site. Read more: Vietnamese bloggers go to YouTube chiefly looking for embed code

Source: Alexa August 2008

Gmail is second to Yahoo! Mail

Many Vietnamese also love spending time on Wikimapia.

A predictable and inevitable move…

No need to mention the localized version of the search portal google.com.vn, Google’s presence in Vietnam could be predicted since their AdSense for Vietnamese browsers has recently displayed contents in Vietnamese, and frequently with Gmail and Orkut.

An Orkut screenshot, click on the image to view the original version.

The 20-million-internet-user market is rich and potential to Google as well.

…getting over certain issues

It’s important to mention some issues with Vietnam market for Google

1. Volume of frauds in AdSense from Vietnam
2. Buyer habit
3. Revenues the business expect to gain from selling advertisements to Google services
4. e-Commerce law

(2) is changing dramatically and is driving (3).

We’ve seen signals to improvements to (4)

So I guess it is high time Google was here in this rapidly developing country.

News is just news, no news is bad news.
Or is it no news is good news?

What do you think when you know the news?

I’ve observed various reactions from people in the industry.

1. “Hitting the market first” is getting tighter it’s hard to breath.

Many service providers have aimed to push their products to the market before Google comes to Vietnam.

Now they do!

Any plan to pre-ampt Google would be extremely hard.

2. The non-technical users are not as excited as the technical communities

While most agree that Google search is powerful, many non-technical are happy with Yahoo! services including Messenger, Mail, 360, 360plus and other local service providers.

Another thing to look at is connection speed. Vietnamese users suffer from bottle-neck effect to international websites. However, even with that, Google search result load speed is surprisingly amazing with their distributed network.

So all in all, non-technical users have very few reason to celebrate

3. Technical communities are jumping up and down in joy now

Because they have established the habit of relying on many Google services.

Well I have two things to say

Firstly, I don’t want to be forced to use the localized version of Google without an option to revert to the international version. I have tested the result from Google international search and Google Vietnam search and they’re much different. I’d prefer the international version, thanks. And I appreciate that Google provides the URL google.com/ncr for the international version.

Secondly, I have to ask this: does Google really love Vietnam?

No I’m not kidding. You may want to know that Coca-cola doesn’t invest too much on marketing and market penetration to compete with Pepsi in Vietnam. They’re here to make locals aware of their presence and not to let Pepsi equate cola to “Pepsi”. You may want to know that Honda introduced the Click and the Airblade with heavy subsidy in Vietnam not to head on directly with Yamaha’s Nouvo series, but not to let Yamaha dominates the whole market. This is important to keep in mind because in Vietnam, “the web” is equal to “Yahoo!” for many beginning users.

We want to see how strongly Google will push the Vietnam market…

I admit that what kept me on Facebook for so long is its ability to host photos. I’m really happy how Photos and Photo upload work in Facebook.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that it auto-resizes photos to 604px width.

I don’t use MySpace, unfortunately.

The third most popular social networking site is Orkut, and I have some friends there.

I’ll just make a comparison on my most frequently used feature: Photo sharing.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan. When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”

This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.

“The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.

“The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.

What Yahoo is missing in this vision is a personal profile, where users express their interests and personality to others. Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, he said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on.

“If I get an e-mail from Saul Hansell, I should be able to click on his name and see his profile,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you.

In this vision, people have two pages: a profile they show to others and a personal page on which they see information from their friends as well as anything else they want, like weather or headlines. That’s different from MySpace, which combines all this into one page.

Already My Yahoo and iGoogle are increasingly collections of widgets that hold content and applications from multiple sources, some of them already social, like e-mail and feeds from social sites like Flickr. But much more is coming.

This approach has a lot of potential and a few pitfalls. To start with, everyone who joins Facebook understands that what they do on the site is about sharing information with friends and sometimes strangers. People who use Yahoo Mail, or just exchange messages with someone using a Yahoo Mail account, have no such expectations. So the company will have to be very careful in how it explains what it is doing and ask for permission in the right places.

“This isn’t a separate product,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user.”

What’s more, running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club. Yahoo and Google are so big that the most they could aspire to would be to create the online equivalent of a crowded bar at a train station, rather than a club for a particular sort of person.

But since Yahoo and Google already have hundreds of millions of people visiting each month, it may well be that they can get a fair number to stop and chat.

Saul Hansell, BITS blog, New York Times

Comments

A good move. Every social networking site now offers private messaging service. Their features are very limited and more importantly, in separated sites.

Net users still depend a lot on their primary mailboxes for the mainstream messages.

Delivering social networking into the mailbox is just so fantastic natural: bring the outer layers into the core.

As for personalized homepages, it is not a big surprise, as with a few content wrapper tweaks, I can make a netvibes page a integrated social networking space now. This is an example:

click the image