Hot on the heels of MySpace Korean comes another international addition of MySpace, i.e. MySpace India. From recent buzz on the Web, this Indian version of MySpace will going to be launched on this April 17th, and there will have an official launch party at that night as well. In particular, this party located in Taj Land’s End Amphitheater, Mumbai will be free, starting from 6pm and there are three awesome bands: Pentagram, Superfuzz, and Them Clones to be featured at that party, according to an Indian MySpacer.

Nevertheless, MySpace Indian version is up and running at this moment. In other word, Indian users can now sign-up to this site. Unlike MySpace Korean, this site will only available in English, and Indian users will not find their native languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, or Malayalam on MySpace India.

AOL is in the midst of launching the Chinese versions of its portal: Both of the Taiwan and Hong Kong portals are available to the users now.

For the Taiwan version, it features lot of AOL’s free contents and services, such as Email, AIM, daily news content, video search and etc. According to AOL, “People in Taiwan are among the world’s most sophisticated Internet users,” said Maneesh Dhir, Executive Vice President, AOL International. “Our goal is to deliver an experience that leverages the depth of our product and content offerings, tailored to the individual interests of online users in Taiwan.”

Moreover, AOL will also deliver a co-branded AOL/HP portal for users of HP desktop and notebook PC’s in near future.

In pertaining to AOL’s Hong Kong portal, it was created by a joining force with China.com Corporation, the leading pan-Asian integrated Internet service company, and its affiliate China Internet Corporation. Like the Taiwan portal, its services offered to the Hong Kong people will also include Email and AIM. At the same time, Hong Kong users are entitled to access the message boards and built-in chat, i.e. “ICQ - I seek you”. However, unique content such as Feng Shui, Chinese cuisine and recipes, Cantonese pop entertainment, horse-racing forums by famous Hong Kong commentators, and Hong Kong stock market update can also be found on the portal. In all, this portal will be managed by the AOL Hong Kong team and thus, it was mainly focused on serving the Hong Kong users.

Apparently, AOL has its vision in Hong Kong, as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of America Online, Inc., Steve Case said: “Our goal in Hong Kong, as around the world is to help make the interactive medium a central and valuable part of people’s lives. AOL Hong Kong offers the Internet and much more: local Chinese content, powerful global content and community, and simplified access to the Internet. At the same time, AOL is delighted to join with our partners, China Internet Corporation and China.com Corporation, in helping fuel Hong Kong’s development as a key Internet hub in Asia.”

The most popular social networking platform in South-East Asian countries, Friendster has added a new launguage, i.e. Indonesian. With now the availability in Indonesian, Japanese and Korean languages that they added in last December, Friendster is now fully supports seven languages - English, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. But there’s still much room left for Friendster to carry out their languages covering project, particularly in viewed of Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysia), and Thai (Thailand) still not existed on their home page.

To date, Friendster still the number one online social network in Asia-Pacific. In an article released by comScore, users from Asia-Pacific spent approximately 90 million hours on Friendster barely in August last year, as shown in the picture below. Meanwhile, they also released another report recently, stated that Friendster in Indonesia has over 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors as of February this year.

Source: available at http://www.comscore.com/blog/2007/10/consumer_trends_in_social_netw.html, accessed 10 April 2008

Agency for Science, Technology and Research is starting an eight-month competition, called The Star Challenge 2008 with the purpose of building the next generation of multimedia search engine. In their own ideas, this search engine offering is aimed at disrupt the market especially multimedia files such as images, videos, TV shows and radio programs but which are currently hidden behind hypertext pages. The competition offers a cash prize of $100,000 for the winner and is open to anyone located anywhere in the world. Though many are saying that $100,000 is not enough to start a new search engine by scratch, but it definitely add pressure to the search market that users would want a new influx of technology other than the current few big search giants.

A new online advertising network was launched on Christmas in Asia, called Nufflets. It is probably a new startup that want to build an empire based on online advertising. They currently ran a promotion whereby a new publisher that approved by them will be entitled to US$15; at first they credit an approved publisher $5 and the remaining $10 is credited after the publisher provide a link back to this Ads network. Additionally, they have some strict requirements on the approval processes. The publishers that they approved must own the domain names, and the publishers must reside in Asian countries, mainly Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, China or Japan. The entry requirement for a blog or Website is that it must generate at least 3,000 page views per month and Nufflets reserve a right to terminate a particular blog or Website when its page views is below 2,500.

I think they trying to compete with Google in this field when I saw they payout a check when publisher accumulated $50. This contrast to the minimum payout $100 by Google. Instead of fearing gorilla like Google, I think that they used Google as a motivator but their market is completely different.

I’ve came across this site ShowOrNot for some times now, and it seems this site is gaining momentum slowly. Apparently, from the whois record of the site’s domain name, it is a one-man project from Malaysia and there are lot of Malaysian Chinese visiting to this site regularly. Most of the videos found on the site are their favorites, and was considered to be evidence that ShowOrNot is the one-stop video site for Malaysian, more favorite than YouTube, at least for them, albeit that this site is much away of the attention that YouTube attracted.

On this site, you’ll come across users’ profiles, mostly Malaysian Chinese, their brief backgrounds, videos that they uploaded, i.e. in the My Gallery, and friends they made on this site. ShowOrNot also provided sections such as “todays’s hightlight,” “most watch,” and “Top Ranking.” To some Malaysian, they like this site because the videos uploaded there are those filtered by their friends. There’s a saying that friends are all alike, those videos shared there are the favorites among all the South-East Asian people.

Until today, YouTube was still the most popular video sharing site on the Web, but many of the South-East Asian retained fondness for this site. It showed that the world is much bigger than what we thought it was, and there are several small sites that started to carve out their own niches in their respective countries. Look at Friendster, there are more people talk about Friendster in Asia South than Facebook or MySpace. I even read on the Web that some people coined this site as “Friendster + YouTube = ShowOrNot.” Why don’t they mentioned, “Facebook or MySpace + YouTube = ShowOrNot?”

Friendster, who already conquered the Southeast Asian countries in online social network activities, is launching the Japanese and Korean version of its site. The initiative is another example of Friendster moving aggressively into the Northern side of Asia, Japan and Korea since it launched its Simplified Chinese version in October this year. With these two new additions, Friendster is now available in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

This type of language venture of Friendster is something sets it apart from other successful social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Friendster is focusing on Asian countries, and each different country represents different types of markets. For example, China is developing and very competitive, whereas Japan and Korea are two developed countries, while Singapore is competitive, Philippines and Malaysia are relatively stagnant, and Indonesia is a huge market waiting for them to tap in. They knew if they can make it big in all of the Asian countries, they can avoid to face tough competition in the U.S. market, and if they lose out in one single market, it’ll not affect their total market share in Asia at all.

Last month, I did posted a post on the Friendster’s developer program, and now the Friendster widget directory is available for its users to integrate to their profiles. I can’t tell how easy the widget could be embedded onto the profile since I do not own a Friendster account. However, the widget concept has recently been understood that its presence is “good for the users.”

As of present, there are eight (8) widget categories for one to chose from, namely Slideshows & Photos, Just For Fun, Entertainment, Games, News & Information, Sports, Video and Music. Each category has listed the widgets for users to add onto their profiles, and the widget selected will then apply to a hidden box underneath the “More About User.” Currently, companies that developed the widgets are Slide, RockYou, Jangl, imeem, and etc. Though the Friendster widget directory hasn’t been officially announced, but there are few Friendster rabid users have embedded Slide’s Slide Shows onto their profiles.

Would the presence of widgets be most valuable as part of a larger social networking site? However, in my own viewpoint, there wasn’t a perceived need for such the widgets by the South-East Asian people, because it was unlikely that the users would customized their own profile and try to make their profiles stand out from that of others. Most of my male friends that owned Friendster accounts are those who want to look for friends online from there, or spend time in browsing other girls’ profile pages. Unfortunately, I am not this type of people, and I can’t imagine myself login to my Friendster’s profile once in every day and do these, and basically these are the reasons that stopping me from opening a Friendster account.