struggling dreams

It was the darkest year of mine. So goodbye 2009!
Derrick tweeted it then showed in friendfeed.. turned out 24 others liked it.

what is recency to you?

For me, there’s an issue that I never been through before.. and I have to go through this time.. In this matter, I have to choose wisely, wether I should act like a king, peasant, loser, coward, knight, lover, or simply a gentleman.. but never be a hero…

For me is cleaning things up. Clean up the mess that disturb everybody.. It was a true mess from the scratch.. when it was published, people in my circle know.. Google and all other social tools I joined, make it even worse… I have to clean myself up..

That post was meant for a destruction… What, who, where, how… doesn’t matter anymore.. It ruined some people life.. and of course mine also.. I had deleted it… and more cleaning jobs…

This post is a part of being myself. I’m not an Englishman.. I am Indonesian!

Do you have comment?

oh.. the lazy me… It’s already 2009, about five months since my last post. I skip 2008’s review and 2009’s forecast posts, probably I have forgot everything I did last year.. good or bad… (sorry for the opening rant, this is a personal blog anyway)

What I’m about to share is how this social media really make things change. You, most likely never met me in real, but somehow we can easily be connected in social tools like Twitter and Facebook then people have this impression just like we went to junior high together (confession: I did not have many friends back in junior high). There’s nothing new about this experience if you have been using Facebook or Twitter for years and you live in North America or Europe, but it’s new for me, an Indonesian, even with ‘at least’ years of experience with active accounts on Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg and Facebook.

These are new for me.. My father recently joined and make tons of various posts in Facebook. The 67 y.o also made friends with hundreds peeps…

On second thought, I will do 2008 review and foresee 2009 posts. Personal updates for sure.. (enjoy)

uh. btw. according to this site, I joined Twitter since September 2006.

This is a simple update… Most likely will be deleted and replaced by a better post.

It’s obvious that I need a better time and idea management, so I can post more and having my blogs regularly updated. Yet, to be community manager of whatever community occurred by things I initiated.

The cluttered things on my head… frustrated me… in this post, I’m just trying to be honest to my readers…

To: Paul Caridad Sanchez

cc: Oprah, Schwab, BBC, NBC, Mommies, Twitterers, Geeks

bcc: The World

Subject: simply want to be your friend

hi Paul,

Ok, I got your attention now. Instead of replying via Twitter DM, I like to do it in a post where I can be more than 140 characters, thus (probably) give your video few extra hits from my network and Google search result. I am not really sure this works… but hey, let’s give it a try.

You asked me what inspired me to follow you. To answer that, I have to memorize my twitterring activities in a past few week.

Twitter has been the center of attention for social media analyst in the past few months, and I read what those social media guys write about it. So many, then I decided to actively follow more people just to have sort of “experience” added on comprehending what those guy blog about. Not as much as you do but reasonably sufficient for me.

Note: I still don’t get it how Jake Marsh, Calacanis or Scoble listen to tons of twitterers, I suspect they frequently check at replies or utilize tweetscan and summize more than everybody else.

Here’s how. I find people to follow from some references like these:

• A post by Jeremiah Owyang to encourage social media people (who follow him) to connect each other. I checked you weren’t there.
• Twubble by crazybob definitely helps to find like-minded, friends of friends to follow. This could be the connector.
• Nice posts I read and happens that the blog owner have a twitter account. Did not read yours until yesterday.
• Tweetscan result (I did on intention to find people to follow only once, with keyword “South East Asia”, “Asia”, “Indonesia” and “Jakarta”) which clearly, you never listed there.
• Random picks from friends’ follow. Possible connector
• Random tweets. Possible connector.

Knowing the one to follow is important for me. I don’t want too much noise and could worse, spams in my page. Simply say, I tried to be bit organized on listening whilst I don’t want to miss good contextual tweet either. So I do these things before decision to follow:

• Check the Twiterer’s bio and stat. Recency, how many updates, friends and followed. You are a digg addict, then must be interesting links come out from your tweets. Your stat says that you need more followers (friends).
• Visit the Twiterer’s website and found out more about the person. You won on this

Ok, enough all about social media, twitter crap. Now, here is why I follow you. I watched all your videos, visited your lousy blog, and helloed @you. Then I conclude:

You are a great man and I want to be your friend. I empathize your cause, admire your spirit and think that your doing is a portrait of struggling (see this blog title), thus will actively support you. Your presence in this blog could inspire others…

About your blog. Please do post properly, so people can track you conveniently then you can benefit more from organized feedback. You would benefit more from a mention in a Seth’s post, of course the blogosphere.

About the your video view count. I think your old 8 wishes & 10,000 miles video is a bit overtime by last message loop. Approximately you wasted 2 minutes, whilst youtube counts a valid view only for a full view (a research by tubemogul). Probably missed some view counts there. You were doing better with the new 8 wishes but way too little views compare to the old one.

look forward to hear your updates. Good luck and God Bless You

cheers

For everyone: to know about Paul Caridad Sanchez, please view his 8 wishes video and don’t stop until the video end. Also, don’t forget to visit his blog

Oprah, please interview this nice guy.

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.

You probably one of those who think that my English sucks.

Yes I know, pretty much aware of the issue since I read/write lots on web but found that only a few really got my points. No, I am not that into stubbornness on this, but my top priority still to improve my time management (very lousy).

Noticed from statistics that non-Indonesian often visit this blog. Of course I love to share my thought to those who don't read Indonesian, but most of the contents written in bahasa Indonesia. So, I made "english" as a new category to help those English readers finding English content easier.

Please browse the English content. 

Bertepatan dengan hari ulang tahunnya, saya mendapat kesempatan untuk mewawancarai Roch Basoeki M, seorang penulis, pengamat dan aktivis sosial, budaya, dan politik Indonesia. Pada wawancara singkat ini, beliau ditemani oleh editor dari buku yang sedang dikerjakannya, yaitu Jainul Dali Munthe, pendiri dan ketua The Institute of Public Service. Berikut video wawancara mengenai buku tentang permasalahan Lumpur Lapindo yang sedang ditulisnya.

Tidak terekam, cerita beliau mengenai permasalahan Lapindo dan perputaran uang adalah bagian yang sangat menarik yang tercetak pada bukunya. Buku yang belum berjudul tersebut dijanjikan akan mengungkap banyak hal yang tidak diketahui oleh masyarakat. Bukan karena disembunyikan oleh pihak-pihak tertentu, melainkan memang banyak hal tidak pernah muncul dalam bentuk pertanyaan. 

Sebelum menulis buku ini, beliau bersama rekan-rekannya dalam Forum Komunikasi Perduli Bencana Negara (FKPBN) aktif dalam menggalang kepedulian masyarakat terhadap bencana negara di mana musibah Lumpur Lapindo ini adalah salah satunya. Berbagai kegiatan FKPBN yang dilaksanakan mungkin kecil artinya secara materiil bagi korban lumpur Lapindo, namun secara moril sangatlah tinggi. Pada peringatan hari Sumpah Pemuda tahun lalu, warga korban lumpur bersama-sama dengan FKPBN menyatakan perjuangan mereka adalah perjuangan bangsa Indonesia. Peringatan itu dihadiri antara lain oleh Rieke Dyah Pitaloka, Franz Magnis Suseno SJ, Slamet Rahardjo, dan beberapa tokoh lain yang perduli.

Hal istimewa yang terjadi pada peristiwa itu adalah warga korban Lumpur Lapindo menganugerahkan Lumpur Award kepada Franz Magnis Suseno yang sebelumnya menolak menerima penghargaan Achmad Bakrie Award.

Wawancara video ini adalah yang pertama kali saya lakukan dengan menggunakan kamera N70, dan skill yang pas-pasan jadi mohon dimaklumi keterbatasannya. 

Buat Para Peminat Daftar Friendster

Sudah sejak saya post mengenai referensi cara daftar friendster di blog ini, statistik menunjukkan bahwa trafik yang dihasilkan dari keyword "daftar friendster" cukup besar. Nah dugaan saya adalah banyak dari para pendaftar baru itu tidak bisa berbahasa Inggris… Sekarang mereka bisa nyoba dech pake friendster dengan versi bahasa Indonesia… tinggal klik Friendster – Bahasa Indonesia. Meskipun masih sangat payah bahasa Indonesia nya, tapi jelas Friendster sekarang sadar bahwa Indonesia adalah pasar yang HARUS dipertahankan ketimbang mereka berkompetisi head to head dengan MySpace dan Facebook di belahan dunia lain. Pastinya mereka harus menerjunkan orang secara khusus untuk target pasar Indonesia ini. 

Warning untuk Local Social Networking Service

Seperti yang saya tulis di blog partai perjuangan dotcom, bahwa penggiat web service dengan layanan serupa seperti yang populer di dunia cenderung mendapat tantangan lebih berat bila tidak mempunyai konsep yang original yang membedakan nya dengan konsep para pemain besar. Bila layanan seperti Google, Yahoo, Friendster, MSN dan lain-lain itu mulai berbahasa Indonesia, maka bagi para pemain lokal akan menjadi lebih berat. Bila tidak ada ide diferensiasi yang original yang feasible untuk diterapkan, maka layu sebelum berkembang sangat mungkin terjadi, kecuali layanan serupa itu hanya merupakan pelengkap dari layanan lainnya. Sepertinya begitulah logika kapitalisme murni.

So teman-teman Fupei, kl.face, bergaul.com dan lain-lain sebaiknya punya atau bikin strategi antisipasi kalau bikin yang original nggak cukup waktunya. Contoh lagi: wordpress.com dengan bahasa Indonesia bakal bikin susah layanan blog gratis versi Indonesia seperti blogdetik.com yang berplatform wordpress mu.

Lowongan Kerja di Web

Karena banyak web ngetop sudah mengarahkan layanannya ke Indonesia, maka lowongan kerja seharusnya akan terbuka lebar untuk para penerjemah ahli. masih banyak terjemahan yang kualitasnya rendah dan terbatas. Beberapa yang akan tersedia dalam bahasa Indonesia antara lain: beberapa website Google, beberapa web Yahoo dan pastinya Microsoft. Masih ada lagi web seperti Multiply, amazon.com, iTunes dan lain-lain.

Note: Ivan Lanin bisa punya bisnis baru nich: nyedian jasa terjemahan web…

Tags: webbahasa Indonesia, Local Social Networking, Friendster, layanan web, localization