Facebook and Renren in China

Late last year Mark Zuckerberg, founder and owner of Facebook, paid a visit to several companies in China. In particularly Zuckerberg visited Sina and met with CEO Charles Chao, had discussion with Alibaba and Taobao. He also had lunch with Baidu’s CEO Robin Li, of whom Zuckerberg have known for a long time.

The one China social giant that Zuckerberg did not meet was the team at the Beijing based Renren (人人网). As of this writing Renren is the largest social network in China with over 100 million users. Could this omission be because Renren copies Facebook too much?

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Review: Flickpad for iPad

If you enjoy looking at photos on the Internet you will be familiar with the social photo sharing site Flickr, and may even have an account on it. Aside from Flickr many have also shared photos on the social network Facebook.

The user experience for exploring photos on both of these sites are okay but they are rightfully focused on an individual rather than on the photos as they would if it was a photo browsing site, because both are social sharing web sites. Until now there are no tools to view these photos from your social graph on both of these networks together in one place, which the iPad app, Flickpad, is designed just for this purpose.

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Exodus of Facebook and What to Do About It

Other than the “Red Shirt Movement” in Thailand there is also a movement to stop using Facebook.

This all started when Facebook announce their “Open Graph API” initiative. I am not going to explain the details of this API here, because there are extensive documentations on Facebook’s Developers web site. The reason for concern is not because Facebook has opened its API, but how Facebook is doing so and the side effects of these actions.

From the beginning, users of Facebook have used it as a private network where people share personal information with only people they desire and no one else. In recent days/months due to various changes to Facebook it has betrayed this trust that over 400 million Facebook users have placed on the site.

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Dangers of Young Generations on The Net

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ebckRNly_Q
At Pacific Coffee this morning I observed a boy; about the age of ten, at an Internet workstation. From the start I see that he is fidgety, and is the type who cannot sit still. When he jumps onto the computer the first thing he does is sign into Facebook. He scans the posts in his Home stream, then proceeds to FishVille for the next 15 minutes.

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Farmville Sending Users Away from Facebook

Today I noticed the above message when trying to load the Farmville application within Facebook.

Several weeks back the creator of Farmville, Zynga launched Farmville.com. At first I was surprised to see Zynga makes such a move; as if it is biting off the hand that feeds it. Then I looked at the reported 11 million users that plays Farmville every day, I realize Farmville is actually growing up and venturing off away from home.

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Review: Facebook 3.0 on iPhone

Facebook iPhone LogoThis morning (Hong Kong time) Apple finally approved version 3.0 of Facebook’s iPhone application on the iTunes App Store.

It had been widely talked about since Joe Hewitt, the developer for Facebook iPhone application, announced on August 16th of its submission to Apple for approval on the App Store. Only took 13 days, 1 day shy of Apple’s stated average time to approve an iPhone application on the App Store.

This new version has a brand new UI and much better UX than the previous version. With many of the tasks rethought with an obvious user centric refinement.

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