Technology As Innovator

The argument which was left unclosed…

On the fly with the news, I hastily posted an entry on the status of Facebook’s translation to Vietnamese project. That entry was left unfinished with a big gap between my premise and my conclusion.

So here I am to fill the that gap with more complete points

…urged me to review basic principles of the market…

The search for the answer reminds me of two articles that should be read going further into Facebook’s strategy

“Facebook is a relationship-centric SNS”

TanNg, Vài gợi ý cho người dùng mạng xã hôi ở Việt nam

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“As with the overseas Vietnamese students, we tackle them by word of mouths. So far, we have identified a number of key Vietnamese student networks in the US and the UK. But again, it depends largely on “viral effect” – one person sign up, love it and spread it to others. We have great faith in our product and are working hard to constantly improve the system. So yes, we plan to use a combination of word-of-mouth and traditional outreach strategies.”

Khoa Pham & Thanh Le, Interview with faceViet’s CEO

Leave these points here, we’ll come back to them later.

…to get the foundation questions answered

1. How does Facebook acquire users?

Facebook started off in Ivy League’s colleges. Then these students introduced the website to their connections. More and more joined and used the service because it was a useful product.

That’s why we say Facebook is a relationship-centric SNS. The motivation for users to use Facebook is mainly their connections. Facebook’s user acquisition is organic and natural as long as it remains useful a product to the users.

How about Vietnamese users? A picture is worth a thousand words

2. What builds reception readiness?

In the illustration, I put my hypothesis on reception readiness of Facebook particularly and the social network concept as a whole.

So what found this readiness in users?

1. The use of interactive IT systems in their work/study

Emails, KPI management systems, deal tracking systems (yes, CRM or issue-tracker if you’re more familiar with either of them), e-learning systems, version control systems, discussions boards, digital submission systems, scheduling (or timetabling) systems, accounting systems, payroll systems…

The more proficient people with (some of) these systems, the more ready they are to use interactive SNS.

How familiar are the majority of Vietnamese students with these systems?

2. Media coverage & user educating

Or how well the media educate potentials users of the values SNS bring them.

User educating is not PR; it’s about values. It should not involve throwing the product on users; it’s about attracting them. It’s not about exposing your greed selling to users first; it’s about solving their problems first.

3. Water the root

Correctly if I’m wrong, but I believe that spending more efforts on power users would reinforce the organic introduction loop.

Where is the root of Vietnamese SNS users? Mr. Thanh Le from faceViet mentioned his point above and I agree with him.

3. Why will Facebook dominate the Vietnam market when they launch?

1. Because Facebook has the root of the roots.

2. Because Facebook is mature in all product, brand recognition and business model, if compared to other competitors from local market.

3. Because Facebook will stand longer. This crucial point is usually, and possibly intentionally, ignored in many discussions on SNS in Vietnam. All Yahoo! 360 users have gone through the fear of losing their contents and social graphs. They will make judgment in choosing the next destination! I think they are smart enough to know how big (which in turn means stable) the world’s biggest SNS is and how long it is going to last store their contents and social graphs as compared to competing services.

But Facebook doesn’t satisfy the needs of many Vietnamese users…

What do the majority of Vietnamese users need now?

• A blogging platform? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not content-centric. Nevertheless, it has a powerful Notes application.
• Media sharing? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not content-centric. Nevertheless, it is launching a music site.
• Customization? Well, Facebook is relationship-centric, not ego-centric. Nevertheless, certain application allows users to customize their page.
• Facebook is overwhelming with feature. Well, writing on walls, sending messages and uploading photos are way too hard it took me forever to learn. Fortunately, Yahoo! 360 and Flickr did are doing very well to educate users (including me) on these three extremely difficult tasks. Other features? If you don’t like them just leave them be, they won’t bite.

OK, leave the details there and take one step back to look that the big picture.

Vietnamese users, in their first experience with Web 2.0, were given a blogging platform (Yahoo! 360) and very basic social networking features. They want a place to communicate, express and share. The options for them were way so limited while local services are still not mature, or in other words, many Vietnamese users have not used a full relationship-centric SNS yet. We don’t know how Facebook will change their preferences until it does. This we don’t know, doesn’t make an argument whether Facebook satisfies their current needs or not. Reality will answer.

Conclusion

This entry fills the gap I left from my previous argument: Facebook will dominate.

How do you disagree with me? Or which service do you think will challenge Facebook?

Acknowledgment

With special appreciation to these people for helping me with this post:

Duy Doan, VCCorp

Thu H. Nguyen, Australian Consulate General

Hi Everyone,I want to share with you some news from Vietnam. Yahoo! unveiled several Vietnam-centric initiatives as part of our Southeast Asia business strategy. One of these initiatives is called 360plus - A new Vietnamese blogging application.This offering provides Yahoo! users in Vietnam with more ways to customize their blogs, connect to friends and share their experiences with their social connections.

Just to be clear, the 360plus product is specific to the Vietnamese market and it is not the new universal profile that we have mentioned previously in this blog. So, while 360 is transitioning to the new profile for users worldwide, the 360 name will live on in a different product in Vietnam.

On a related note, many of you have asked for an update on the new profile. We are working on an update and will post it to this blog this week.

So, goodbye for now — or as they say in Vietnam, tạm biệt!

Matt Warburton

Yahoo! Community Manager

Source: Yahoo! 360 Product Blog

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Comment: Yahoo! has supported Open ID. It is reasonable to predict that the new product namely Yahoo! Profile to replace 360 will employ Open ID.

Social Networking is definitely fun, but some players are feeling lost

Haven’t even experienced Social Networking fatigue…

It is predicted that Social Networking will reach its peak in around 2009 before experiencing gradual decline.

2 years is too far away, at least to an average user. Why not have all the fun today?

The truth is, I am really enjoying Facebook and all it’s got: relationship-centric network, mature core functionalities, rich applications, nice gifts, intuitive design…

Mini-feed is also a great idea! Whale done, Mark! With it I can explore what my friends have just been doing and so can they. A great way to know more about other people.

…but I just realized one important piece is missing

You can explore what your friends do daily on Facebook. Very good already…

Consider it more deeply, have you identified what are missing here?

You don’t know what your friends do in real life. Furthermore, you don’t know what they THINK!

Knowing one’s activities on one platform is great, but would it sometimes drive you to the assumption that you know what others are doing and thus spend less time interacting with them via more traditional but human way or reading what they have to write?

How do people express their ideas? Via what they have to write down (Blog!), or take photos on (Photoblog!), or produce video clip for (Vidlog!). Less likely via sets of pre-designed virtual gifts

No, I don’t mean that gifts don’t represent the hearts. I still treasure each and every gift my friends have been giving me, but I’d appreciate it more if they simply write in their own words or post their own design.

Because we’ve been bringing content to Social Networks…

I have emphasized many times that Social Networking is totally different from Blogging. However, due to the two facts that they are born so close to each other and that several sites offer both simultaneously such as Live Spaces or Yahoo! 360, the two are often mistaken to have to be together.

Let’s, for now, consider them cousins anyway. Who should follow whom?

It happens all the time that Blogging has to follow Social Networking, mainly because:

• The number of people ready to send pre-defined gifts outcrowds the number of those willing to write about what they think
• The inertia to connect with quick messages outdoes the urge to share well-thought ideas
• Social Networking activities are less time-consuming and less effort-consuming so they are done more frequently within the day. On the contrary, Writing takes time and efforts and Reading is usually done for once. In comparison, users visit Social Networking sites much more often than they do Blogs. “More times of visits” makes the impression of “being bigger”. Smaller ones always have to follow bigger ones don’t they?
• More times of visits per day means more ads generated and higher click-through rates. Subsequently, more revenues for site owners and more investments are expected.

User-generated contents, if applicable, may be integrated into Social Networking profiles via RSS and/or addons. Correct me if I’m wrong, though it takes much more time and efforts to write posts, the section containing these posts is not the center of the majority of Social Networking profiles, and is often depressed by the higher density of other quicker and painless activities.

…but why not the other way around?

After following me down here, is there any reason you can think of to do the other way around, which means to bring Social Networking functionalities to Blogs?

Shaking head?

What’s the point?

Any profits doing so?

I’m answering this question: Yes! There are.

Those serious about publishing their own content will not be hindered by limitations. The will to write will push the authors to overcome the (possible) difficulties.

How the world floats

We’ll see how people do the hard job of bringing Social Networking to Blogs.

MyBlogLog: more than merely $222 per blog

MyBlogLog builds communities around blogs and provides bloggers the ability to be updated of activities of their connections. Activities here are content-centric: read and comment.

The recent $10 million acquisition by Yahoo! has raised interests in MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog reports 45,000 registered blogs. A simple math gives us the price of each: $222. An innocent question comes following: will Yahoo!’s ads cover this cost?

Come on! Don’t pretend to be that naive. An acquisition doesn’t necessarily offer tangible benefits today or even next year, but the truth is that the concept and foundation of the seller then becomes more powerful in the strong hand of the buyer.

Acquiring MyBlogLog belongs to a grand strategy of Yahoo!. “MyBlogLog - a Yahoo! service” will not generate handsome profits alone, but will do so greatly when the platform is integrated with other legacy Yahoo! services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Mash, Yahoo! Blog platform.

I am bringing networks to my blog with MyBlogLog.

DiSo: what should always have been

Distributed Social Networking is the next ambition of Open Web community. It brings

Visualize this:

• All things are done on your site without having to push your content to a small box in your Social Networking profiles
• You can add other bloggers as friends instead of simply putting them in your blogroll
• You can offer people your RSS feeds
• You can see your connections’ updates such as: Tai reads ‘Kafka on the shore Review’ on Lisa’s blog in 19/12/2007
• You have your status on your blog
• You see and can choose to pose list of recent readers of your blog
• You can send friend requests to other bloggers
• All things are done on your site. No tight boxes in other places

What does this mean? It means your content is the center of your site. What takes the most of your time and efforts deserves meritorious position.

How does it sound?

How do you feel about its future?

I know you care, so please just share…