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

First, I want to thank you all for joining/supporting me and Twitter Community in Vietnam at this Tweetup on Sunday, June 7, 2009.

I must admit that I felt a little bit awkward at first, because none of old Tweetup mates (except Anh Hung, KhanhLNQ, Jishan) came. As Ngon Pham said, I was like lost in an isolate island. I talked to myself: “What is the point of all these things? Why do I have to do that? Where is everybody else?” Yes, I was discouraged. But well, I have to say “Thanks” millions times to people who came join us that day, and billions times for being so active and contributive, for helping me out. We had about 20 people showing up - perfect for a tweetup. The only matter is that it was in Vietnamese, so it wasn’t so convenient for some non-Vietnamese speakers who came late. I’m so sorry about that, and I promise the next Tweetup will be in English as all other tweetups. I’m also sorry to people who couldn’t come because of late update about the venue. To people who didn’t come, please think twice & listen to actual attendees before talking ill about it.  Be thougtful!

By Lawrence Sinclair :)

Who were there?

1. Chris Tran Huu Luat – from Admax Vietnam.

2. Tuan Tran – ???

3. Tran Dang Khoa – ???

4. Le Nguyen Quoc Khanh – i-Pop Vietnam

5. Minh Phan – i-Pop Vietnam

6. Paul Nguyen Hung – VON

7. Tim (Tuan) Duong – i-Pop Vietnam.

8. Thuy Uong – Admax Vietnam

9. Le Nguyen – Focation

10. Do Dang Khoi – Saigonica

11. Anh Hung – TPL

12. Son Jishan – Frexy

13. Lawrence Sinclair – EastAgile

14. Patrick Kennedy – the US Consulate in Ho Chi Minh

15. Phuong (Pi) – ….

16. Tung Nguyen – RMIT

17. Le Na – ???

18. Phuong Luu - Saga

19. Huyen Chip (me, of course. I love the number 19 :D)

20. Ho Viet Hai – i360

21. Nguyen Duc Khiem – Mobile review

22. Bui Huu Chuong – …

23. Another guy from EastAgile, sorry, what is your name again?

24. …

My memory is really bad, so please correct me if I’m wrong, and please help me fulfill this list! Thanks a lot!

What was it about?

This tweetup was mostly about:

1. Yahoo! 360’s being shut down and its potential substitutes for Vietnam market: Facebook, WordPress, Yume, Yobanbe, Tamtay, etc.

2. The future of Twitter.

3. The market. Yes the truth is Vietnam market is very small, how can we deal with that?

4. Mobilization.

*** You can see/download full report (English) here, thank to our Minh Phan

*** We have some videos here, thank to KhanhLNQ.

*** Official hashtag for all Ho Chi Minh Tweetup is #hcmctweet

*** For more information/latest updates, please join us on Facebook and Googlegroups, or follow us on Twitter.

Thanks a lot!

Dec 6th morning I went to Microsoft Innovation Day at Microsoft Auditorium in Singapore (at NTUC Center). These days MSFT are trying to lure people everywhere. I attended the same session about Silverlight just 1 day after at BarCampJB in Malaysia!!!!

Here is the agenda.

I’m not really interested in .NET and Microsoft, but I’m interested in technology/technical evangelism. But ghosh, I lost the way as usual and arrived NTUC around 11am (this event was from 9.30am to 12.00am). Thanks God I didn’t miss the session about Windows 7. Well, they boasted a lot about it (you can see in the slide) and I wonder how it will look like. How many people here have a laptop with touch screen??

But if you’re interested, you can download some slides of this event here. Microsoft has a blog for Singapore partner at the address http://sgpartners.spaces.live.com. Wonder if they have the same site for Vietnam but they don’t.

Today I came through an interesting post on Hùng’s blog - he disagrees with Tom Davenport’s opinions about the priority for web 2.0 in this economic recession on BusinessWeek (Plz don’t ask me anything about economy or I’ll look like a dead meat =.=). Hùng, to be honest, I like your braveness and I’m quite happy to tell that you’re kind of optimistic person.

Agree with you that web 2.0 is not only about interacting and sharing with each other. Web 2.0 is greattt, and I do believe Tom has the same idea in mind.

“I am not suggesting that we will be returning to the Dark Ages, or that there isn’t some value in Web 2.0. We’ll still have friends, and it will still make sense to write on their walls on occasion. Networks are important, and they contribute to economic life as well as social life. Even over-employed workers will still produce some user-generated content. But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in. “

I think Tom was not saying that Web 2.0 had no value at all, he just wanna ppl to pay some more attention on other industries regarding what is the best for the economy. We need someone to produce real things not only ideas. Remember, Internet is just a tool, not your bread (well, except ppl those work on that industry - like me ). Knowing people is a lot of fun, but we are talking about how those relationships help us in our career, right? And I’m sure you see the answer, your most important thing is “YOUR CAREER”, not tools.

And maybe the Vietnamese context and American context are different. When I asked a friend of mine who is now in the US about Facebook and other web stuff, he said he had already wasted too much time for them, and now he had to do something for living. He is more than right! Web 2.0 has been a buzz in the US for ages, and there’s already a dot com bubble so ppl have rights to worry about another bubble. But VN is different, everything is new, so everyone’s making a fuss over that. FYI, none of sns in VN is profitable so far. Some big guys have signs showing that they are running out of money, and “smaller” guys are all waiting for VCs. And plz correct me if I’m wrong, there is some information telling me that IDGVV (IDG Vietnam) recieves no less than 50 projects a week!!!!!!! How competitive! Vietnam is not Silicon Valley anyway.

And forget the question mentioned in the title. I just don’t know how to name this post hahaa.