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I was reading this book by David Kline and Dan Burstein on how blog was going to change the way the world interact. Three minutes after opening it, I said: "Wait a minute! This book was published in 2005, that is, when Facebook was an infant, Youtube was about to come out, and Twitter was nowhere. It's an astonishing fact to me that some of our integral interfaces DID NOT EXIST, only 5 years back. In other words, our planet was functioning without a large proportion of its veins, only 5 years back.
The Internet has been evolving so fast that nothing is predictable. -- This is my take on it.
My newest attention on Web2.0 revolves around the popularity of Sina's Weibo (Microblog), the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Weibo has been a huge success and many (I wouldn't mind being included at all) say it brought a revolution to the way they process information. Barely 1 year since its launch, Weibo has a userbase of millions. This number is projected to reach 100 million in 2011!
Here's a summary of all the things that Weibo did differently from Twitter:
(1) Unlike Twitter (which only supports links), Weibo offers a wider range of features including attaching pictures to tweets (weibo's), commenting/sharing others' tweets, categorizing users being followed, etc.
(2) It promoted the product by inviting celebrities, who are often too busy to maintain a blog, but often have a few minutes to kill while waiting for a connecting flight. This has been a huge success!
(3) Event-based marketing was also emphasized. During FIFA World Cup 2010, such a big buzz was produced that 1,904,369 weibos (tweets) were generated on July 12th, with a record high of 3,619,063 total tweets (including re-tweeted) on the same day.
Here's an article with more on why and how Weibo plays the game differently: http://www.chinahourly.com/life/2317/
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