Instant mobile messaging, social networks and China.

Since Kaiser Kuo was referring to a note I wrote for the Facebooks users and since not all of you are on Facebook yet, please find it here ...

Link: Facebook | My Notes.

It was only August 24th 2007 when I wrote an article on Facebook on our blog.

http://blog.boondoggle.eu/2007/08/facebook-in-chi.html

I ended that article with these sentences:"Google links people to content. Facebook links people to people. Guess which of the two is more valuable."

This was the complete post: "I've been looking at Facebook recently. For many hidden reasons. One of them is that there are indeed already a few 10,000 persons who joined the group "China". Some foreigners like me. Lots of Chinese too. Recently Chinese newspapers too start writing about it :"Facebook is now open to users outside the US, and young Chinese are joining up fast" What's the next phase here? I don't know. Seems to be bigger than anything that happened before in that field. I've been on so many of them. eWorld of Apple was the first back in 1994. I was the only Belgian at that time. The last non-business one was Orkut. I gave up. Not more than a hot picture gallery at that time for Brazilians. Facebook seems to be different. It's as addictive as the others and a lot better too. It could also become a valuable corporate tool. Like email. The proof? Facebook - it is said- costs Australia $4 Billion in lost productivity. And in the US 45% of workers recently surveyed indicated that their employers block access to Facebook. The other half of the companies look at it as a valuable networking tool. They're right. In China it will be a very valuable networking tool. Chinese are addicted to "being connected". To Guanxi. And ... when these applications move to a mobile platform linked to GPS the sky will be the limit.
Hopefully Facebook finds the solutions to integrate brands in a natural way. Then their future will be rosier than Google. Google links people to content. Facebook links people to people. Guess which of the two is more valuable."

5 months later in The Guardian of December 17th Jeff Jarvis (journalism professor at the City University of New York) writes an article about Facebook, climbing the social scale.

Read this.

"Never mind websites. Forget page views. They're so 2006. This was the year of Facebook. The social site, started in 2004 to organise college communities, was finally opened to the rest of us, and in the spring, it was discovered en masse by media wonks (like me), who forced acquaintances into joining, using the evangelistic fervour of recent cult converts. Then, in May, Facebook opened up to developers, who now were able to add applications to the service; already, they've built 5,000. And in October, Microsoft beat Google to invest in the company at a valuation of $15bn. Worth it? I'd say yes. Facebook has 50 million active users (each worth $300, according to Microsoft, as opposed to $500 a year for a newspaper reader, according to Deutsche Bank). They are joined by 200,000 more daily, all of whom spend an average of 20 minutes every day inside. But far more valuable than that is the realisation of Facebook as a platform, on top of which we users organise our communities, and on top of which those developers are building venture-backed companies. Facebook analytics firm Adanomics tracks the supposed value of these applications, pegging the most popular, Top Friends, with 20m installations, at $28m. Facebook is answering the question every company should be asking: what would Google do? Google built a platform that enables others to build businesses; now so has Facebook. Indeed, 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's ambition is to build the Google of people."

The Google of people. So nice.

I think Jeff Jarvis is right.

What about China in that respect. Easy to predict! Combine Social Networks and Mobile and you get the answer. It was this week in Newsweek

http://www.newsweek.com/id/78112

"Many experts are starting to think that the Chinese are leading the way to a new kind of social Internet—one that emphasizes the kind of instant communication that Herman and his friends prize so highly. Recent surveys leave little doubt that a different kind of Internet culture is emerging in China—younger, more devoted, more addicted to speed and intimacy than its Western counterparts. With tens of millions of Chinese gaining access to broadband each year, says a recent study by the Internet research firm Netpop comparing China and the United States, "Chinese have the potential to shape Web commerce and culture far beyond their own country." In many ways the big difference in China can be summed up in three words: instant mobile messaging. The low proportion of home PCs has made the mobile phone the preferred Internet-access device. And Chinese clearly prefer instant messaging—chatty, real-time communications that takes place via PC or cell phone—as opposed to ordinary e-mail, in which you never know when your correspondent might respond"

What a wonderful world. According to some guesstimates there should already by now be 40,000,000 instant mobile messaging Chinese.

http://adage.com/china/section.php?section_id=260

Mobile Instant Messenger links people to people wherever they are. Can it be stronger?