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By TaiTran, January 2, 2012 7:54 am

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By TaiTran, December 23, 2011 11:38 am

1. Vietnamese users like colorful, emotional, right-brain products. Twitter is analytical, left-brain. Right-brain: Tumblr, daily life, emotional messages, visual.
2. Vietnamese users are unfamiliar with Follow, and have no incentive to learn the concept.
3. Twitter is individualistic while Vietnamese in general are collectivistic.
4. Vietnamese users haven’t had the need to follow influencers. In fact, many social influencers are not tech-savvy. Early Twitter adopters are geeks and online marketers who are not appealing to mass users.
5. Vietnamese sentences are longer than those of English, on average.
6. Early adopters started to use Twitter in 2007-2008 when smartphones were costly to mass users. When smartphones are much cheaper now, Vietnam Twitter is deserted. Also, it took too long for mimo.vn to roll out SMS service.
7. Twitter offers no gamification.

Would Weibo clones do any better than the wave of dead Twitter clones in 2008? We’ll see.

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By TaiTran, December 17, 2011 3:09 am

Sometime in 2008 I was having issue with my Twitter account.

1. A search of keyword "taitran" did not display my tweets
2. My tweets were not displayed in hashtag aggregation, for example #barcampSaigon

I DM @support and received no response.

On 1 December 2011 I DM @support again and received a reply

Please file a support ticket http://t.co/AqfAUZF so that our agents can check out your account. Mention that you’re not in search. Thanks!

I filed two support tickets. The cases are resolved after two weeks. Here is the response from Twitter:

Thanks for letting us know that your updates were not appearing in Twitter search results. In order to provide the best search experience for users, Twitter automatically filters search results for quality. To understand what might have caused your Tweets to jeopardize search quality, please review this page:

http://support.twitter.com/entries/42646

It looks like at some point a third-party website was posting duplicate Tweets to your account. We’ve now updated your account settings so that your Tweets will appear in the search results. Please note that it may take at least 24 hours for recent Tweets to be indexed, and due to the dynamic nature of Twitter’s search algorithm, you may not find every recent Tweet in Twitter search.

So the issues resulted from third-party apps messing with my account. I unauthorized all suspicious programs.

So now my Twitter account is back, full-pledged and healthy.

Hello searches and hashtags, so long!

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By TaiTran, December 3, 2011 6:41 am

Since 2008, the following

1. qblog.vn
2. hola.vn
3. tiutit.com
4. nhangui.com
5. lamgi.com
6. kucku.vn
7. tictac.vn

A veteran from the Twitter clone craze in 2008 is mimo.vn and they did implement the SMS mass messaging feature that I had hinted. Another one is also left is saigonica.com

In 2011, these new local micro-blogging products were launched:

1. ming.vn from VCCorp
2. live.zing.vn from VNG
3. pega.vn from VCCorp [slightly different in that it works on "add friend" mechanism instead of follow]
4. vsao.vn

The wave of Weibo cloning will be observable in 2012.

Meanwhile, Tumblr is growing rapidly. Vietnamese users like right-brain products.

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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.