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By TaiTran, April 9, 2012 6:35 pm

Facebook’s issues:

1. Photo innovation has been slowed
2. The heat from Pinterest
3. Finds it hard to provide photo experience on mobile (even with Snaptu team)

Thus the acquisition.

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By TaiTran, March 18, 2012 3:16 pm

1. Lightbox doesn’t load on slower machines.
2. I can’t press Page Down to view the comments, need to touch the mouse. Using mouse links to Repetitive Strain Injury.
3. I can’t press End to scroll all the way down to the box where I can add my comment.
4. While Facebook photos are resized to 720×540 standard, many other products which blindly imitate Lightbox implementation may host tall images and such images won’t fit in the screen. Lightbox makes it a lot harder to view the image.

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By TaiTran, March 3, 2012 3:16 pm

One of the reason why Pinterest in taking off rapidly is because it is doing a much job at sharing interests than the giant social network Facebook.

Facebook has been staggering with interest for a few years. These are where it sucks:

1. Interest sharing hasn’t been going well with profile design

The profile in 2005 where everything (including apps) is crunched into one page is too clustering. Then the interest are hidden away in secondary tabs in the tabbed profile in 2009. With the current timeline profile, interests are stored in the "About" section which is a rightful place but this is only explored by experienced users.

2. Like?

The design just before Timeline allows declaring interests in Music, Entertainment, People who inspire etc.

What annoys me is that as soon as I declare my interests, Facebook automatically makes me Like the respective pages. These pages have their own issues, detailed in the next point.

It wouldn’t be an issue unless Facebook limits the number of pages I can like!

This hinders interest sharing and exploration.

3. Community pages

There are many generic pages for interests which are not managed by authorized organization. Instead, Facebook displays Wiki articles for these interests. Wiki articles are knowledge-soaked, structured, organized, authority-imposed, and dry. Interests, only other hand, should be organic, natural and sometimes emotional.

This doesn’t feel right.

4. Search

I used to be able to search for people sharing the same interest. Not anymore.

Without searching, what’s there for exploration?

5. Bad design

Icon design for interests on Facebook are boring and ugly.

So Pinterest comes in. It’s beautiful, organic, feminine, better designed. But I won’t dwell too much in Pinterest, not yet.

The moral of the story is: Facebook has realized it can’t do everything well, so it chooses to be a platform. If a product can solve a need better than Facebook, it can haz cheese.

Another Facebook feature that sucks: Networks.

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By TaiTran, January 27, 2012 7:18 pm

According to WSJ and Mashable, Facebook is raising $10 billion at valuation $100 billion. This is the largest Technology IPO in history.

With 2.5 billion shares outstanding, they stock may open around $40 per share.

*

This valuation would yield

P/S ~ 25

P/E ~ 67

Is $40 lucrative. One word: buy them all!

My personal forecast is that on the first trading day, the price will shoot to at least twice the opening price.

Compared to recent Groupon’s IPO, Facebook provides more liquidity: 10% (vs. 5%) ~ $10 billion ~ 250 million shares. Facebook doesn’t need the trick of limiting supply like Groupon did.

Why? Groupon has been facing fierce competition from Living Social, and the business model is clouded with concerns on sustainability. Facebook, on the other hand, dominates social network and even web skeleton. Facebook’s barrier to entry include products, communities, vision and management.

There is no question to short-term speculation on Facebook IPO.

My question is: what is Facebook doing with $10 billion it is raising. Apparently, liquidity for founders and investors is never the focus of Mark.

*

Note on speculation:

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By TaiTran, January 10, 2012 7:39 pm

Messages in the format "every time someone sends the message, an [organization] will donate [amount] cents to [the cause]", accompanied by sympathetic (and disturbing) pictures, are almost always a scam.

Why

1. You won’t find the information on the official communication channel of the organizations (UNICEF, WWF, NGOs…)
2. The chain mail / chain messages have been a disease on email and MSN messenger. Technically, it’s impossible for the creator of the content to track how many email/message have been sent.
3. It is possible to track on Facebook, but if the campaign were real the owner would have used more effective methods e.g. ad
4. You won’t find the story on credible sources when you search

Why would anyone do that?

1. On websites: to attract pageviews
2. On Facebook: to attract likes
3. Or just for other malicious purposes

Please, my friends, be mindful what you share. Be wise not to annoy your friends with these hoaxes.

Examples

The cancer baby hoax and demystifying the hoax

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By TaiTran, December 21, 2011 1:28 pm

As a small(er) merchant, I am tempted to ask Foursquare:

Why do I have to run a campaign on Foursquare when other marketing channels are available to me?

1. Search
2. Context ads
3. Facebook ads
4. Groupon
5. Contests on Facebook page & Twitter

On product level, Foursquare’s competitors include Facebook Places and Gowalla, which was acquired by Facebook.

On monetization level, Foursquare’s competitors are all marketing service providers available to SMEs. When Foursquare wants to scale, it’s going head-on with, gasp, Google, Facebook and Groupon.

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By TaiTran, November 20, 2011 4:12 pm

10 years ago the first thing Vietnamese learn about communicating through the Internet is chatting. There were some services targeting Vietnam market before Yahoo! Messenger came to dominate all communication channels.

Yahoo! Messenger’s domination in Vietnam opened up the way for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! 360. In recent years, the email market share is largely chipped by Gmail. Yahoo! Messenger, while the top IM client, faces competition from Skype. Hotmail, Live Messenger and Gtalk are not widely popular in the country.

A growing trend is, however, that people start to learn about social networking and Facebook. Many sign up for the Internet to, first thing first, communicating via social networks. The same is happening in other South East Asian countries.

The social network battle in Vietnam in 2011 boils down to the dual-horse race between the two leaders Zing Me and Facebook. While Twitter and Plurk gain traction in other countries in the region, micro-blogging in Vietnam has never taken off. Even technology-enthusiasts use Facebook for live reporting (which Twitter is logically most suitable for) and viralling current events.

Why? My attempt to answer the question:

1. Vietnamese language comes with diacritics thus requires a lot more than 140 characters to express a full sentence
2. Vietnamese users are more familiar with “Add Friend” relationship than “Follow” mechanism
3. Most importantly, Twitter doesn’t satisfy the gamification demand crazed by Vietnamese users. Vietnamese teenagers go on Zing Me mostly to play webgames. Many also go on Facebook sheerly for games rather than for connecting. Foursquare has received lots of attention probably thanks to the rewards and Mayor competition.

The next question pops into my mind: if gamification is so important, why hasn’t Plurk known in Vietnam while it is very popular in Taiwan and the Philippines? Again, my attempt

1. Plurk hasn’t been covered by local media which is crucial in the growth of services. Facebook received local media coverage.
2. Many influencers don’t know what Plurk is. As for me, I deactivated my Plurk account after collecting many medals.

Thanks @salsabeela and @kounila for sharing the information on social networking in your countries.

Addendum

Tumblr is growing rapidly in Vietnam.

Ngoc Hieu has an explanation on the adaption Twitter: Vietnamese users like colors and emotions, neither of which Twitter offers.

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By TaiTran, October 22, 2011 12:22 pm

From 2006 through mid 2009, the hottest web property in Vietnam was the blogging platform Yahoo! 360. The reason was Vietnamese were largely using Yahoo! Messenger as a default online communication tool, and 360 was directly integrated to Messenger.

Out of 4 million global users, 2.5 million were from Vietnam, and the latter were highly active.

Starting from 2008, the service has gone extremely unstable with many bugs left open. Despite being flawed and faulty, Vietnamese expressed the will that the product should be spun off and sold to a Vietnamese operator. Nevertheless, Yahoo! decided to close down the service, leaving Vietnamese netizens disarray, disappointed, discontent.

The localized Yahoo! 360plus from Hong Kong was a big flop.

Where have they gone?

• The majority find social networks sticky. They settled down on Zing Me (now 8 million users) and Facebook (now 2 million). Apparently the numbers include the next generation of users
• Geeks use self-hosted WordPress
• Non-geeks who take writing seriously setup WordPress and Blogger accounts
• Around 2 million on YuMe, a 360 clone

Yahoo! MeMe, a microblogging tool received almost no attention.

Yahoo! just launched its new blogging platform, Yahoo! Blog. I have the impression it was created with Korea market in mind. The product is neatly done with improved and clean design.

All it receives from Vietnamese netizens are smirks and rejection. Too late for Yahoo!. The users were left with despair and they now turn their back on the company’s attempts. Hope it’ll growth in Korea and Hong Kong.

Again, even if Yahoo! didn’t close down the faulty 360, could it have successfully monetized the community in the first place? My guess is no. Yahoo! never tried doing so.

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By TaiTran, May 29, 2009 11:58 am

Yahoo! 360 is officially announced to be closed on 13 July 2009.

The impact this movement has:

Users

4 million users worldwide and 2 million Vietnamese users lose what they call “home-base”.

Vietnamese bloggers had long equate “blog = Yahoo! 360“. The closure will change that perception.

Where are they moving to

I have noted down my prediction on Kevin’s blog here.

I have personally moved most of my social graph to Facebook.

Yahoo!

• Yahoo! loses a global product which has been a bulletin board.
• Opportunity for Yahoo! 360plus.
• Yahoo! Profile has won the battle against its siblings.
• Yahoo! Feed looks promising amist.
• Full focus on Yahoo! Open Strategy.

Competitors

The global forces: Facebook is climbing Alexa Vietnam rapidly.

Local competitors: good news?

Ecosystems

There are two ecosystems in Vietnam on Yahoo! 360: 360themes and LinkHay feed. They will be heavily affected.

How about you? What impact will the closure have on you?

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By TaiTran, May 7, 2009 3:19 pm

Why quizzes seem to increase

1. Platform: Facebook redesigned its newsfeed that allows more contents to be published
2. Technical ease: Quiz creation platform is available so it’s easy to create new quizzes
3. Workflow: The applications publish the quiz’s result and users might not really know which step publishes the news onto feeds
4. Savviness: Some users might not know how newsfeed works

Why quizzes are seen as spam

1. There’re just too many of them
2. The change of the newsfeed has moved relationship-centric updates such as relationship status, friend connecting to other friends to the Highlights, allowing content-centric applications to rise to a high percentage on the newsfeed. In sum, the number has increased linearly, but the percentage has increased polynomially.

If you don’t like seeing quizzes flood your newsfeed

Simply use the Hide function by hovering your mouse over a feed item. Please note that you can either hide the application or hide the person.

You can unhide anytime by clicking “Edit Options” on the bottom right corner of your newsfeed.

I personally hide applications, not people. I leave, however, Enneagram and those backed by certain scientific theories.

Is it a wrong move by Facebook?

1. Facebook earns commissions from applications’ income
2. Some don’t like the new design, others do
3. Facebook architecture is flexible, they can change course anytime

How about you? How do you feel about the newsfeed, especially the quizzes and games?