My Internet Notebook

a journal on software, mobile, marketing

Archive for March, 2007

Too Many Niche Social Networking Sites?

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Joga.com is social network for world-wide soccer fan. Although joga.com is sponsored by big companies (namely Google and Nike), its traffic has not been on a steady growth. On the other hand, traffic to Myspace.com (THE generic social networking site) has been on a phenomenal upward growth ever since late 2005. So the question is: is there value in creating niche (such as sports) social network sites?

Two other VC backed niche social networks, wiredberries.com and takkle.com, are in the same boat as far as growth in traffic is concerned.

Related Info for: joga.com/

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Update: a new sports social networking site Ballhype.com just released their public beta.

Written by Y.

March 22nd, 2007 at 11:21 am

Posted in Web2.0

Paul Graham on Finding Startup Ideas

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Quick quote of the day:

Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that’s the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.

From: Paul Graham on startup ideas.

Written by Y.

March 19th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

Posted in Business,Software

Google Sending Traffic to Yahoo, MSN etc?

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Is Google sending search traffic to rival search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and MSN?

google sending traffic to yahoo

It looks like so in the screenshots I took. I accidentally ran into this when I searched for ‘Blackberry 8800’ in Google. Google not only returns me some, as always, some good results, it also returned a list of links to rival search engines right below the Google search bar. I don’t recall that I have seen this before.

This definitely surprised and puzzled me quite a bit. I know Google is famous for its ‘do no evil’ philosophy. But when it comes to business of making money, I have never seen Google being so generous. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention in recent development …

Written by Y.

March 16th, 2007 at 11:56 pm

Posted in Internet

Yahoo Try Again – Chinese Flickr Site Coming

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Apparently Yahoo thinks the China consumer market is too important to ignore. They have plan to introduce the popular Flickr service to Chinese markets, starting a rollout in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Yahoo already has a photo sharing service in China, which is similar to Yahoo Photo in the U.S. While the service, which is free, is pretty good, they have only about 9% of the market share. According to iResearch, Netease.com Inc. took the largest share with 43.4 percent followed by QQ.com with a 33.9 percent share, though other media companies such as Sina Corp. are fast catching up.

How to make money from photosharing in China is still not clear. Being used to free photo sharing services, Chinese consumers may not be thrilled by paying for a Flickr premium account. But if there are enough entertainment values in an offering and it does not cost an average person’s one month salary, you may be able to find a business in online photo sharing after all.
Yahoo to launch Chinese version of photo site in 2007

Written by Y.

March 16th, 2007 at 10:06 am

Posted in China,Internet

What Is Enterprise Software 2.0

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An informative interview of SocialText CEO Ross Mayfield by SandHill.com. SandHill.com | Management | The Next Wave of Enterprise 2.0. Some interesting tidbits of information:

HBS professor Andrew McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 like this: “The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

In classic enterprise 1.0, 75% of enterprise knowledge are communicated thru and buried in email messages.

Intel-backed integrated Enterprise 2.0 solution, called SuiteTwo combines “best-of-breed” offerings in wikis, blogs and RSS from Socialtext, SixApart and Newsgator, bundled them on an Intel-based appliance and offers service and maintenance through SpikeSource. The market reception has been phenomenal.

My thinking on this is that Suite Two is missing an important web 2.0 aspect, which is social networking / community building. Teams, groups , divisions within a large corporation are just natural elements of a ‘social network’. I can imagine more communication and active knowledge sharing will happen with this model.

Cisco’s recent acquisition of tribe.net makes me think that Cisco may be onto something that’s going to be big in the next few years. Adding Cisco’s communication solutions (VoIP etc) on top of all the communities you can build with tribe.net, this starts to make more sense to me.

Written by Y.

March 6th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

Posted in Business,Software