btrax blog

MyTown takes social networking to whole new level – beating giants like Facebook to the punch through its addictive location-based gaming approach.

Much like Foursquare, which has recently emerged as a serious challenger to Yelp, interaction isn’t limited to only personal communication, but engaging the user by having them make their neigjhborhood and environment part of the experience.

It will give you a whole new experience on exploring your own city or others, because of its central gaming elements. The user (or player) can “purchase” real places near your location, such as a Starbucks., then collect rent from people who visit your places. The experience is like playing Restaurant City on Facebook, but in real life.

As similar social gaming platforms in Asia have experienced, MyTown has zoomed from a small startup founded in 2008 to a 800,000 users platform with 3.5 to 4 million check-ins per day. The brains behind MyTown is Booyah and CEO Keith Lee says that average users spend 50 minutes per day on MyTown.

Because of Foursquare, the gaming concept of check-ins has gained traction and is gradually becoming a must-have for social networking site. Even Yelp is getting into the action, rolling out a check-in function on its iPhone application. Facebook is also currently developing this function too.

One of the reasons Facebook has lagged is that gaming has not been a core part of its business plans, instead farming it out through APIs to secondary app developers. Yelp was also founded on very different community principles, rewarding an elite, serially posting set of super-users.

By comparison, MyTown was developed by a group of veteran game designers.

As smart phone ownership and usage continue to rocket upwards, Foursquare and MyTown will only grow, either eclipsing their competitors or more likely get acquired by their more heavily funded counterparts.

Twitter and Facebook both have global ambitions. And we know global means China on the horizon.

However, Chinese people already have a huge array of social media options – many of them developed by Chinese. These regional players have been quicker to capitalize on their deeper cultural knowledge, but their approach to growth might look very familiar.

The majority of the users are young, and almost 80% of them are referred by friends, classmates, or colleagues. On average, every user owns 2.78 accounts on social media sites, and most of the users use social media for entertainments, and 27.4% of users play mini games.

QQ alumni
The #1 social networking site in China. In terms of registered users, it has attracted the most users out of all social networking sites in China.
572.3 million total registered users

Facebook
The world’s most popular social networking site isn’t big in China. Although China’s government has blocked them without much explanation, dedicated mainland users still find ways to access it.

In contrast, Facebook is hugely popular in Taiwan (which also uses Mandarin) and is one of the fastest growing countries for Facebook with about 367,400 new registered users each week.
5 million Taiwanese users
56,480 Chinese users

Twitter
There are many clone sites of Twitter in China – partly helped along by the Chinese government’s enthusiastic blocking of Twitter.

TaoTao, which was launched by the same creators of QQ, is the biggest Twitter doppelganger with 51 million users. However, the terms of use limit what content can be put on the site.

Despite the challenges, Chinese users thirst for tweets from celebrities like Britney Spears, Shaquille O’Neal and Ashton Kutcher knows no limit and work-arounds proliferate.

Youku

There are 113 million unique users visiting video sharing sites every week in China. The market is definitely attractive for growing foreign social media sites, but most have failed due to the same challenges facing Facebook and Twitter – including video giant YouTube. Youku is the most popular video sharing site operated by Chinese in Chinaand and ranks among the top ten most trafficked site in China.
Estimated 6 million+

Bababian
Bababian is the Chinese clone of Flickr. One interesting difference is that it not only allows users to upload personal photos, but also images of tings to sell from Tao Bao, a popular eBay-like Chinese online shopping site. Combining these two powerful features has been a boon to Bababian and has attracted a substantial following across the social web.

Many star singers and musicians have started to use social media to reach their fans (and potential fans).

Twitter and Facebook fan pages have become particularly popular ways to engage with exclusive updates, blog musings and photos.

Now artists are taking it to a whole new level by debuting music videos, live streaming of concerts and fan contests.

Although emerging artists have been able to use this asymetric marketing to big effect, mainstream artists are increasingly embracing it. Shakira recently released her newest music video on Ustream , embedded on her Facebook page as well.

Likewise, Foo Fighter held a live concert using LiveStream on Facebook, and Jason Mraz chatted live diretly with his fans. All of those activities help them engage better with their fans through the virtual platform, rather than radio spots with its pay-to-play system and hard to penetrate broadcast TV shows.

Shakira and Foo Fighters are not the first ones to do this, but the fact that big labels see social media marketing as athe main stage, instead of a sideshow.

Photo by alejandroamador

今話題のホットなインターネットベンチャー企業が集中するサンフランシスコの小さなSOMA（South of Market）地域。 2002年に「.com」バブルがはじけた後も、その人気はいまだ根強い。
新しく流行るものを作り、大不況の風にも負けずWEB業界で一世風靡しようと、夢と情熱と独自のスタイルを持った若い才能で活気だち、いつもSOMAのどこかの片隅で、アフター５に最先端のWEB技術・文化を紹介するイベントで盛り上がっている。

Photo by Maurice Ramirez

最先端のブログソフトのひとつWordPressを開発するAutomattic本社もSOMAにあり、btraxのオフィスからサンフランシスコ ベイに向かって徒歩約10分の距離にある。今日は、そこで行われる「Chic meets Geek」と「サンフランシスコ オペラ ブラボー」共同主催のイベントに、btrax チームがプレス（記者）として出席することになり、皆で仕事帰りAutomattic本社に足を向ける。

「Chic meets Geek」は直訳すると“上品・洗練された娘とオタクの出会い”。一瞬、「電車男」のストーリーを思い浮かべがちだが、イベントのスピーカー及びVIPリスト（下記）や、会場で行なわれているプロダクト デモンストレーションリストを見ると納得。　SOMA（ここで）の辞書を1ページめくると、「Chic meets Geek」は、「Geek（コーディング　カルチャー）とChic（エンターテイメント カルチャー）の融合」と訳されるらしい。

スピーカー及びVIPリスト：
Geek（コーディング カルチャー）

• Matt Mullenweg、WordPressの創立者
• Randi Zuckerberg、( facebook創立者の妹でエグゼクティブの一人)
• Edith Yeung、BizTechDay のエグゼクティブ・プロデューサー
• David Weekly、PBWorks創立者

Chic（エンターテイメント カルチャー）

• Damon Dunn、旧フットボール　プレイヤー（Dallas Cowboysチーム）
• Mattin Noblia、Top Chef Las VegasTV番組のリアリティスター
• Terry Disley、 ポール・マッカートニー等をレコーディングした伝説的なジャズミュージシャン

プロダクト デモンストレーション提供企業リスト

• PEANUT LABS MEDIA
• OneRiot
• NetworkedBlogs
• MixMatchMusic

デモンストレーションを拝見しながら目に止まったのは、MixMatchMusic社によって作られた、iPhoneプラットフォーム用のMobBaseサービス：

主な特徴

• ミュージシャンが、低コストでiPhoneアプリを作成・公開・管理可能
• 写真、ミュージック、歌詞、ビデオ、またイベント情報等をファンとシェアできる
• ファンが気に入ったミュージックを購入できる機能
• ある特定のミュージシャンに関するTwitterの全ての”つぶやき”がみれる
• CMS機能（独自でコンテンツをリアルタイムで追加・削除・更新可能）

先週N.Y.Timesに、無名だった23歳のAdam YoungがMySpaceやiTunes等を使ってオンライン上で自分のミュージックを広めてゆき、毎週約2,000 トラックが売れるようになり、今や彼の“Fireflies”はBillboard一位に輝き、来月ニューヨークのマディソン スクエア ガーデンで主催されるZ100 Jingle Ballコンサートに、超人気ミュージシャン達と並んでパフォーマンスすることが大きくとりあげられていた。

iPhone等のモバイルプラットフォーム上で、才能ある駆け出しのミュージシャンが早く発掘され易すく、又ファンとリアルタイムでコミュニケーション（交流）できる場を提供するMobBase。ミュージシャンやミュージックファンにとっては今後、ちょっと目が離せない。

Mixi
The #1 social networking site in Japan, but threatened by Facebook growth has launched a developer API and other big platform changes
17 million Japanese users

Facebook
The 300 million strong SNS juggernaut should hit 1 million Japanese users in Q1 2010 and double by Q4 of 2010. Their Japanese user base is beginning to move away from English speaking users to more mainstream.
743,000 Japanese users

Twitter
The startup poster child of 2009 is steered in Japan by serial entrepreneur Joi Ito’s Digital Garage and has been profitable by running ads from the start. Growth is exponential, especially now that key celebrities are coming on board as Ashton Kutcher did in early 2009 for the US market. English and Japanese are currently the only languages the Twitter API has been released in.
783,000 Japanese users

YouTube
One of the highest trafficked sites in Japan, rolling over strong competitor NicoVideo despite its less robust user interaction toolset.
21.7 million visitors/month (35% of all Internet users with average 187 min. engagement)

NicoVideo
Has faced similar growth difficulties as YouTube due to copyright infringement, but diehard users love the ability layer text comments and art directly onto videos, sometimes completely obscuring the original content. The Japanese company has launched prototype sites for the Taiwanese, German, Spanish and English markets.
11.3 million visitors/month (18% of all Internet users with average 193 min. engagement)

Flickr
Snap happy Japanese have flocked to the site from the early phases of the site and have been enthusiastic innovators of Flickr innovative API – despite the fact that it still doesn’t have a Japanese user interface. Yahoo’s acquisition has helped introduce the service to an even wider audience domestically, but the separate nature of massively popular Yahoo! Japan means the Japanese market is still relatively untapped for Flickr.
636,000 Japanese users (2007 figure – thought to be in 1-2 million range now)

You may soon be able to sip Twitter brand wine. This shows not only the power of people interacting through Social Networking Sites, but also its potential business development model. All these new projects involving people generating content can be very creative and fun. As we have already mentioned, companies are trying to use these sites to create buzz for their products and company images. They are currently working hard to make people talk about themselves. And some are really enjoying this effective tool. That, however, is not the entire story.

Making Buzz on your Brands

The monitoring of user-generated content has been focused on classifying keywords presence. According to Overtone, Inc., many companies are still hiring people to literally read and manually categorize content. This method creates confusion because nobody can go over everything and accurately classify the words within a certain amount of time.

Different colors, different tastes, like different opinions

Overtone does not only focus on social networking sites, but analyzes emails, phone calls, and other various customer communications.  They are not hiring people to do them manually; instead they have automated listening text analytic algorithms. But there are companies like Radian6 which are focusing on SNS sites. The commonality between them is “listening”. When I studied conflict resolution in graduate school, we learned that “listening” is the basic tool to resolve conflicts. My advice to companies: listen after you sing!

Photos by Yuka O.