struggling dreams

Hello! thanks for visiting my blog... The language used in this web are mixed english and Indonesian, if you don't understand bahasa Indonesia, you probably like to read all english content here. Enjoy your life!

Just like blogging… Twitter succeeded hook me with new cool things. Got referred by Rifie, went to her blog to play her Mixwit of her choices tracks… I said cool! Then I made one too… enjoy!

I don’t know if they know Indonesia is populated by hundreds of million people and we do have internet in our computers. comScore made a report on trends and prediction about Internet titled “State of Global Internet“.

Internet usage is low among Southeast Asia countries except Singapore and Malaysia

are you sure about this? I wasn’t sure they did it right in Southeast Asia coverage. The flaw begins just when they did not count Indonesia in. Simply say please look at the fact that Indonesia is no.4 in world population. Even though Indonesian Internet Users only 9% of its population, still it 4 times than the whole Singapore population (including Singaporean who never use internet).

Although Indonesian international bandwidth mostly using Singaporean or Malaysian channels, it should never be problem for a company like Comscore to trace the request origin.

Alternatively please see:

• google.co.id ranked 3 in Indonesia (alexa) with over 500 million daily pageviews. See Alexa
• Asian Internet Usage

Just like other Internet geek, I like comScore but their flaw coverage on southeast Asia could mislead region specific business interest and overall internet usage mapping.

This, of course part of my experiences using online services like twitter, facebook, friendfeed, qik, ustream, tweetscan, tweeterboard, and more. I just can’t list all here but I will list what found interesting reading and what I do on the web today.

• Upgraded this blog. Now, this blog already using wordpress 2.5. I also dumped the old coffee theme because too many incompatibility with all latest wp engine. I am not into this theme but to find a free and easy to customize theme was never easy for me as I always picky and conservative about design. So I hope this condition is only temporary.

• Read post about monetizing widget in Web Strategist Blog by Jeremiah Owyang. He announced it in twitter last night, and because I believe he’s on the right track on social media, then I paid a visit. Just when I was about adding comment to his monetizing business model through widget list, I found that Rodney Rumford already did much better than what I wanted to add. Credit to him, and I started to follow the founder of facereviews.com. Of course he is good, he’s on it every second.

• I blocked an “unknown facebook friend” named Widyanto Duta Nugroho and reported him on spam act to the facebook customer service. He spammed badly and I never had a real conversation regarding his act (he didn’t response to my messages). I believe, I did help other facebook users.

• I tried few of twitter related services again. These services actually do best for twitter experience: tweeterboard, tweetscan, and quotably.

• Read a post titled “what does facebook actually do for me” by Chris Brogan which he actually asked everyone who follow him on Twitter (or anywhere), and he got loads quality comments. I also added my perspective, bit unique one as I believe that its most comments come from English Tongue (American and English), that probably positioned us, the Southeast Asian as newbies (we are and I explained about it).

• My curiosity. A comment from Chris Brogan post leads me to another good blog, specifically a post about how Robert Scoble (a tech-geek blogger) loves/hates facebook and somehow loves twitter. The blog owner is Hutch Carpenter and he did write very good posts. I shared one on my facebook profile.

• Guess what? Hutch’s post about his blogging experience made me land on another very much worth to visit blog belongs to Louis Gray. Read a post about posting statistic and watch interview video of Scoble by Pete Cashmore from Mashable. From the interview post, Scoble said that he did not know Louis Gray who make it to Techmeme Leaderboard for sometime, of course commented by Louis. As for me… I checked out Techmeme Leaderboard and Technorati Top 100 for most visited blog.

• From a tweet by Aulia Masna, I know that I missed an event, an Id-Mac Gathering which I always wanted to go. More from him, there will be British Council Bloggers Day event sponsored by ChIP on Sunday which also my curiosity at most, but all seat are reserved. I’ll pass another offline blogosphere.

• Subscribed few feeds from above blogs to my netvibes, update and customize mybloglog, watch John Spencer on qik covering something about Celine Dion. No, I don’t forget to check out my facebook.

Early this year, Time reviewed about Friendster moved to Asia. Though I am bit late for the article (just found it), I think it's lame. Everybody in Asia knows that right after myspace and YouTube, Friendster only hope was Asian. However they decided to fight, and they won the social network patent, but for what?

Last year just before the facebook platform hype, it launched its alternative languages features which was chinese, followed by Korean and Japanese but left out all Southeast Asian users which was (is) biggest portion of registered users. Why chinese? Obviously everyone after China for giant market acquisition. How did they perform? Not well…

Friendster traffic ranks in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries according Alexa:

• China 209
• Japan 256
• South Korea 19
• Hongkong 179
• Macao 59
• Philippines 1
• Brunei 1
• Malaysia 2
• Indonesia 2
• Singapore 5
• Thailand 415

And some other regions:

• Australia 20
• New Zealand 30
• United States 101
• United Kingdom 93
• United Arab Emirate 10
• Qatar 11
• India 367

Data not available for South America and Africa (very few).

Look at the traffic ranks, Friendster already failed in China, Japan and Hongkong. China users already enjoy local social networking like 51.com and qq.com, while Japanese has mixi.com. Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director of Asia Internet Consultancy did not even count Friendster in today competition on an interview by ReadWriteWeb.com.

Even though Indonesian contributes as major traffic since 2004, the option to switch to Bahasa Indonesia lastly provided on March this year, and it is very lousy. Other Languages option provided are Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and English.

How is Friendster doing in its birthland, US? According Quancast, Friendster has about 1,3 million American users. About 40% actively contributes traffic on daily basis while 10% described as addicted users and most are Asian of 25-34 y/o. (I can't access Quantcast for second look due to server maintenance?).

I have been user at Friendster since 2004, and it helped me meet long lost friends and new friends as well. I also enjoyed many other services like blog, gallery and feeds. What I found to be annoying were Friendster seems to easily approved fake profiles, did not do much about spams, and did not response well on user reports and complaints. I also had reported some malicious code on few profile testimonials but never received their response. 

They claimed to have 65 user worldwide and growing. I wonder how many of them are fake. 

I suggest Friendster, to be more serious to listen to its constituent whatever languages spoken, find it as more opportunities to reveal. Lucky to have OpenSocial but please do more on the developer page. Also, it is important to have local rep while Friendster execs don't understand what their million users talk about.

Sidenote:

• This blog enjoys traffic from thousands queries on google about "cara daftar friendster" (how to sign up on Friendster).
• Today, I check my Facebook on daily basis.