I used to think that people in Southeast Asia are somewhat similar due to common characteristics in geology, ethnic background and economy. But I was totally wrong. Working and a little traveling have given me a chance to take a closer look into what SEA people are doing online which reveal a lot of differences.

Blogging

I once thought that most SEA people were introvert, but it seems to be that this statement can only be applied to the Vietnamese. I was surprised to find out how active people in other SEA countries are on the Internet.

In Vietnam, there are only a small number of “professional” bloggers. Most “hot” bloggers emerged from Yahoo! 360 and became famous because of sensational rag news, sex, short stories, etc. (things that tradional media can’t mention). It’s true that bloggers in Vietnam aren’t paid much attention. Earlier this year I attended PestaBlogger in Indonesia and I was amazed. It attracted about 1000 bloggers of all social groups: young, old (I even met some 50-something bloggers there); male, female (though male bloggers seem to be more prevalent); poor, rich. They blogged about anything: politics and other sensitive topics. Every blogs in Indonesia [Blogger.com ranks 5 and WordPress.com ranks 7 in Alexa Indonesia]!!

Blogging is also very popular in Malaysia [Blogger.com ranks 6 and WordPress.com ranks 15 in Alexa Malaysia].

In Philippines, there is even a bloggers association and the Philippines Blog Awards. [They call themselves a blogging nation].

It’s also true with Youthsays.com. Even though there are only 13 330 members in YouthSays Indonesia, new questions are submitted at the rate of 1 question/min. YouthSays Philippines is also much more active than YouthSays Vietnam.

Web Services

Generally, youths in Southeast Asia favor internationl products against local products. In almost every country in SEA except Vietnam [Thank to Zing.vn and VnExpress.net], 5 first places on Alexa belong to internationl products [the common denominator are Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live/YouTube]. Although Facebook is now dominant, there are still some other popular SNS and they vary in each country. Thai people show highly favor for Hi5 while the Flippino go Friendster.

Friendster

Unlike in Vietnam, Friendster is a little bit popular in other countries in SEA. As we all know, it just had a brand makeover to target Asian youths, makes it look like just a MySapce-wannabe (according to a friend of mine). The color, logo and tagline are new but the features almost remain the same except they launched “Friendster Virtual Gift Shop” and “Friendster Games” that make it look just like an Asian-born product.

Friendster claimed that it “pioneered social networking, and today is a leading web site throughout Southeast Asia, with over 75 million registered users and over 90 percent of daily traffic coming from the region.”. But from what I observed, Facebook is winning it over.

According to Reuters, there is a rumor that Friendster will be sold off by the end of this year to an Asian Internet company with the value of at least $100M. Our Vinagame might be interested [I'm just joking, but who knows, Vinagame is valued at $500M, they are rich].

In August 2008, it got funded $20M by IDG Ventures. Around that time, they did some pretty noisy marketing campaign in Vietnam but didn’t get any success.

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Some quick facts:

1. Only in Vietnam that people love reading news that much. Of Top 10 websites on Alexa Vietnam, there are 3 newspapers, 1 portal and 1 porn site lol

2. Singapore has the highest Internet penetration rate, 72.4 % population, Brunei ranks 2nd with 55.9% while Burma has the lowest, only 0.2%. Burnese government imposes very very strict censorship upon Internet usage. In Laos, there are only 130,000 (1.9% population) and in Cambodia there are only 74000 (0.5% population).

3. In Singapore, there are only 3,370,000 Internet users but 1,789,840 Facebook users which means more than 50% Internet users there on Facebook. The rate is also super high in Indonesia where there are 30,000,000 Internet but more than 14,000,000 Facebook users. The Indonesian do not only love blogging, they also love facebooking

Recently, two Vietnameses got fined 15 millions VND each (830 USD) for calumniating on 2 forums TTVNOL.com and SanOTC.com. Hanoi Department of Information & Technology charge them for distorting, slandering, diminishing the prestige of a security company named VNDirect. Well who dares to tell that no one knows who you are on the Internet? Last year, Vietnam government also published a policty to censor personal blogs. So, watch your very single words!

And just recently, the 21-year-old founder of 4chan.org was nominated as world’s most influential person by Time, beating off the President of the United Stateds Barack Obama as well as the Queen of communication Oprah Winfrey. As a forum (or you can call it online bulletin board), 4chan doesn’t have a registration system, enabling users to post & discuss anonymously, yes anyone from anywhere.

Does that make 4chan a strong & powerful community?

Well, our government knows it better than us.

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TTVNOL.com is one of the first & biggest forums in Vietnam. Dunno how many members it has at the moment.

SanOTC.com’s owned by SanOTC - an IDGVV’s porfolio.

Vietnamese source.

Hey calm down, I’m not gonna make another long speech about macro-economics or noble patriotism. Just some thoughts about the future of Vietnamese web services in relationships with Vietnamese users and esp. early adapters.

One week ago, I had a very interesting discussion over this matter with CEO of VON - Paul Nguyen. His arguments agaisnt exotic products are:

- We Vietnamese people have to use Vietnamese products. Exotic comapnies like Google, etc. they don’t even have offices here, so they don’t have to spend so much money in Vietnam, don’t create jobs for Vietnamese but they still get users. In the mean time, Vietnamese companies have to spend millions US dollars, pay all the taxes, creates thousands jobs for Vietnamese, they should get something in return. In some countries like China, they require exotic companies to open offices in China, hire Chinese, pay taxes for Chinese governments in order to do business in China.

- Exotic products don’t necessarily mean they have better technology than Vietnamese products. Like Yahoo! 360’s technology & concept is such a lame that no where else in the world use it, except Vietnam. Yahoo! 360 plus is just a failed product in HongKong, then brought back to Vietnam. He believes Vietnamese products can do much better than that. But exotic companies have big names, and Vietnamese people are very fond of exotic things.

But he still believes in the future of Vietnamese products in general and Vietnamese social network sites in particular, b/c:

- We early adapters might find Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Linkedin, etc. very useful and interesting. But the gap between early adapters and mass users in Vietnam is just too huge, and the number of early adapters are just so small (we have around 70k-80k facebook users compared to 2-3 millions Yahoo! 360’s users) that every service provider knows where their cash flow should go to and come from. Many Yahoo! 360’s users don’t even know how to upload a picture, they just simply hit the button “compose a blog entry” and type and send. Exotic products might be too complicated for them.

- The Vietnamese love color and show their own styles, while exotic products are normally just too simply designed. Just an example among many other differences in anguages and cultures.

He said, early adapters should use and talk more about Vietnamese products. Because if we just support exotic products, we will gradually kill Vietnamese products, let the foreigners take over us.

Several days ago was the inauguration of Nguyen Thanh Nam - the new CEO of FPT - the biggest Vietnamese IT company at the moment. One idea in his speech that drew public opinion’s attention was that he called for FPT people to use FPT’s products, not because of love only but because of trust in the products’s quality and the future of company. That might sound delirious, but is it absolutely impossible? He has his point, ofcourse.

Hm it has made me think a lot. Are we too enthusiastic about Facebook, Google, WordPress, Twitter, etc. and forget about Vietnamese products? Are we early adapters, and if yes, where do we stay if no service providers care about us?

I’m confused, though I obviously have my own explanation, but I want to hear your opinions first. Every idea is welcome. Thanks.

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As you all know, VON’s 3 most noticeable products are Timnhanh - a Viet search engine and Yume - a blog & social networkig site, and Kiemviec - an HR site, of which I’m interested the most in Yume - one of prominent candicates for Yahoo! 360′s substitute together with Tamtay, Yobanbe, YouSecond (Yeah in Vietnam blog means Yahoo! 360 and most people have no idea of what social network is. But well, it’s going to be shut down). According to Paul, Yume is gonna have a risky chance in June, with much more social features learned from Facebook.

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Our government is taking it serious: 980 billion dong (~US$55m) will be invested to develop Vietnam software and digital content industry from now to 2012, of which VND-88.6bln (~US$5.2) is for open source, “304 billion dong will be spent on surveying and collecting information on IT industry, upgrading the state’s management ability, promoting investment and developing the industry, another 676 billion dong will be invested in 11 projects of developing electronic information gates on software and digital content industry, building the software and digital content development fund, building IT complex, and other projects.”

This Decision will take effect on May 20, 2009.

Ealier this year, in Jan, VND-38bln (~US$2.2m) was announced to be invested in building and developing Vietnam e-Government news gate.

Source:
Vietnamese:

VnEconomy

90 tỷ đồng thúc đẩy nguồn mở Việt Nam

Đầu tư 38 tỷ cho Cổng Thông tin điện tử Chính phủ
English:

VND-980bln invested in development of software and digital content industry

US$5.2 million to develop open source software

Ofcourse I’m happy I feel like our government is really taking it serious, and something big is gonna happen in Vietnam.

From April onward, residents in Ho Chi Minh can go online, visit HCMC Deparment of Transportation’s website and check for “underconstruction” map, where underconstruction places are marked in red, so that they can choose another way to avoid traffic jam. You can see the map here, it will be updated every week.
Source: TPHCM: Phát “bản đồ lô cốt” để giảm ùn tắc

A website about Thang Long Hanoi (http://thanglonghanoi.gov.vn) will be built in dedication to Thang Long Hanoi 1000 years.

They are all good news, aren’t they?

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P/S: Btw, I just found 2 very interesting documents about ICT in Vietnam and ASEAN that you might be useful for people who care about ICT in Vietnam and ASEAN

Vietnam ICT Outlook 2007

ASEAN: ICT LANDSCAPE