Nothing more important than design…

Social Network December 24th, 2007

Just saw a fast raising UK social network: badoo.com

Very simple in design, good and fancy look (like a web 2.0 does), very simple in function(in compare of all those social networks), very easy for user-user interactive(real time notify, web chat). It makes it grow extremely fast.

Design is so important for a successful web site.

some reports:

http://mashable.com/2007/12/24/badoo-aiming-to-take-on-the-uk-in-2008/

Google said it’s one of fastest raising search term global wise, even above “facebook”:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/

The traffic growth also looks awesome:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/badoo.com/search

Popularity: 100% [?]

Why so few startup choose ASP.NET?

Internet December 16th, 2007

Just read “Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET?”, he asked:

But what puzzles me is that not too many people use ASP.NET to create cool products. Sure there are Community Server, MySpace, DotNetKicks and DasBlog; there are all very fine products, but compare them to LAMP, Rails and Java lineup: Digg, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Backpack and the Company, Delicious, all the Google Apps, Mint, Meebo, Twitter, Zillow and of course Infinite Cat Project. If you checkout the new startups on TechCrunch, it seems like every new startup is something Linux based and is not ASP.NET.

And I really want to know why. If you are a new startup, you have only one shot at it, so you really want to use the best tools available. And it seems like everybody picks anything but ASP.NET, unless you are doing corporate development.

Why are there so few startups that use ASP.NET? Is it the cost of tools? Hosting cost? Restrictive licensing? Or maybe ASP.NET became “the van” of web development. Safe, bulky and definitely not sexy.

ASP.NET is a great web development platform, it’s much more advanced than Java, PHP stuff, ASP.NET’s performance is better than Java and PHP (in same hardware environment, as I tested) , ASP.NET MVC just learned many good stuff from Ruby On Rails, and it ofcoz have much much better performance than Ruby on Rails, and now develop in ASP.NET is as easy as (or rather say easier than) Ruby On Rails.

There are some comments which looks even more interesting. Some guys just say MS technology is not as good as blah, blah, blah, or performance is not good blah, blah, blah…, I just ignore those, because that’s not true — Some people may not really use and compare  Microsoft technology  carefully and jump to a conclusion. I am familiar with PHP(since 1998) , Java EE (since 2000)  and Ruby On Rails (since 2005), and use those technology developed web sites that served millions of register users, when I just into ASP.NET this year, I am impressed with its design, featured and yes — performance. The new release MVC CTP is a preview version, but it bring new light in the near future.

Some view points in the comments sounds make sense:

  • Cost, Money

Cost for development and deployment. Web Developer Express is a toy in comparison to Netbeans, Zend Studio, Eclipse (with PHP Development Tools, RadRails, Java Development Tools, Python extension… ) PHP Eclispe….

  • Be afraid of locked in Microsoft only solutions

If you pick Microsoft as a platform, that’s it. You will be most likely be running a Windows server, using MS tools, and running an MS database. Not only is the cost prohibitive, but the way Microsoft locks developers in is a big turnoff. Why select Microsoft when I can use Ruby, Java, PHP, etc. and run my applications on any platform and database. The flexibility provided by open sources is a big plus.

  • Startup Locked on the very first technology they selected (because of cost, not willing to be locked on MS solution, …)

Start-ups do not start with oodles of money. Two or three merry code jocks can afford to buy copies of Visual Studio. They are reluctant, however, to pay through their noses for hosting. You need Win2k3 and Iis6. Microsoft’s licenses are insanely complex and expensive compared to Linux and Apache. By the time venture capitalists step in, it’s too late. You have a full-blown application, and you don’t feel like re-writing it.

  • Lack of good, cheap Hosting providers for Microsoft solutions

(Bringing my applications onto Amazon EC2 is a snap - try this with a .Net application)

  • Because VC dislike MS solution

I still think that them Venture Capital giants just weren’t sold on Microsoft and so the money (even though it required more of it) went to other technologies.

     Maybe and maybe not. PageFlakes is using ASP.NET, it get fund without problem. I don’t think a VC will consider a startup by questioning using Microsoft technology. 

    The problem is, using Microsoft technology may looks like not “as cool as” open source LAMP solutions.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Open Social is not that "open" after all

Google, Social Network November 2nd, 2007

Google’s Open Social is a new buzz these days, I can’t wait to see what on earth it look like. During my waiting period I blogged a few of words of my concerns (sorry in Chinese only), I feel "Open Social" is either a hype or a "too good to be true" stuff, because several those "friends" of Google are just head to head competitors.

Finally it was there, I am a little bit disappointed with what I see, the "Open Social" is actually a buzz word combination, I would rather call it’s a  web widget/gadget SDK/API.

How to get start?  Here is what google said:

How do I start?

  1. Request access to the Orkut sandbox
  2. Check out the OpenSocial API
  3. Read about the Anatomy of an Orkut Application

I am disappointed again, first, now only orkut sandbox available as a "container"; second,you even need a request to get that orkut sandbox account, I made a request and so far no response.

Open social is not a open API for social network sites, nor it is a protocol or standard that help social network expose their social meta data, it even don’t try to provide unified identity for users who have many accounts in different networks.

Open social is a "SDK" for social network sites to weapon up and become another "facebook platform", that all.

From the documents and discussion groups, it seemed you have to apply from Google to become a "container" site, what an "open" is if you actually need a boss to approve for that "open"?

Fortunately, there is one, maybe the only one available right now, it’s Plaxo Pulse, you can add a rockyou emote gadget to your plaxo pulse profile page:

If you are a Pulse user, the URL for adding an OpenSocial API is:

http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/gadgets/

The specific URL for the RockYou app is:

http://dev2.rockyou.com/google_apps/emote/emote_xml.php

I wrote a simple test open social application, actually it’s just a copy/paste version from Google’s document for an initial test, when I try to add my application to Plaxo, guess what?

– It need approval! Even for a gadget to add into my own profile need their approval! What kind of "open" it is?!

image

Maybe too many people were setting too much expectation on this "Open Social", however it looks more like a google’s PR events for the latest "facebook microsoft" deal, unfortunately.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Good luck, guys in Hulu

Life September 25th, 2007

One of my friends left to join Hulu, an emerging video service company which backed by NBC and News Corp.

Just found from TechCrunch about the name of Hulu, Michael Arrington gave 6 different means in 6 different language:

Image from TechCrunch

Obviously, he didn’t mention Chinese. In Chinese, "Hulu (葫芦)" means "Cucurbitaceae"(Scientific name: Lagenaria siceraria) or the container which made by Cucurbitaceae, or the container which in the similar shape of Cucurbitaceae.  You can see plenty of pictures in this wikipedia  page.

Image from: wikipedia

In Chinese, there is an idiom:"I don’t know what medicine inside his Hulu"(不知他葫芦里买的什么药), the "Hulu" means a mystery container.

Just finished a pint and some foosball with the guy, he is leaving tomorrow, all I want to say is "Good luck! Guys in Hulu!"

Popularity: 30% [?]

Happy Moon’s Festival !

Uncategorized September 25th, 2007

image 

Today is Chinese’s Moon’s Festival,  it’s one of the most important traditional family day in China.  We Chinese people will generally have a family reunification party at home enjoy “Moon cake”, modern young people will night out with friends to have fun. Since in the moon’s festival night, the moon is round and bright, it’s also a great time for lovers, so maybe this is one of the most romantic traditional day in China.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Pictures that ever moved the whole China.

China Today September 23rd, 2007

These are photos which quite popular in most of Chinese bulletin boards, I saw many readers replied that they cried after they saw those pictures.  I , also, can’t stop my tears during I browsing and translating them.

It’s another side of China, but they are so real.

Modern buildings, exciting nightlife, rapid economic developments, … that’s one side of China in most new visitors’ eyes. However, unfortunately, there are other sides.

Sometimes, I feel so hard to talk about China’s situation to my foreign friends, I worried about if I tell them the negative side of China will makes people have more miss understanding of China, however I can’t just repeat the lies that they always hear. 

I know many of my friends, colleagues are so interesting in China, and some are planning to travel and experience China.   I quote those pictures here and translate the description in English just wish to let you get understand better the either side of China.

I tried to translate the descriptions into English myself since I can’t find a ready made English version.  I gave each picture a title by myself, the description was translated from original post, I also converted the numbers from CNY to USD to help reader understand the money in those descriptions. (I used USD:CNY 1:7.5 as convert rate)  Please forgive my lost in the translation.

For me, I feel sad and helpless, I wish those situation could gone in the future, not just get covered and pretend that we are already rich and strong and the fact in those pictures does not exist. 

It’s my homeland, but I am so helpless, shame on this, as some of you may know, though I eventually escaped… but I tried… yes, I do tried. 

(The original links is here, there are more pictures inside, I only selected some from them)

Hero in tears

He is a soldier in Tibet, his medals show his contribution and achievement for this country. He couldn’t come back home when his wife was dying for the difficulty of birth.

Ignore

No one gave a seat to the lady who carrying a baby in the bus

Unfortunately, less and less people willing to help others…esp. after a young man lost a law suite against him by an old woman who he helped.

Lover in the street

Two old blind couples lead a hard life by sing and perform in public.

Help

An old poor lady is dropping a coin to a blind singer on the street

Hard rain

A human wagoner in the hard rain.  Generally his income is less than CNY 5.00 for this trip. (CNY 5.0 = USD 0.60)

Teenager miner

A teenager miner, he is only 17, his income of carrying 50KG for 1000 meters is around CNY 1.00  ( equal to USD 0.13)

Teenager miner II

Old country side lady

A very old lady have to carry for her daily living. This is a typical photo in the country side.

Noon snap

An old man snapping on the street during he selling his how brewed  vegetable

Protest

An old gentleman protest for the unbelievable high education cost. The banner he carrying said: "No school should treat the students as money making target.  No country should turn the students to goods for sale or the source of revenue."

The universe if our classroom

A primary school of a Chinese village, they can’t afford for a class room, so they study outside; they can’t afford for the table, they use stone and woods to build them.

Small farmers

This two brother can’t afford the education cost, for only around CNY 100 per year, and had to work in the farm.  (CNY 100 equals USD 13)

Classes
Two moms and two child. The different classes in the modern China.

Helpless couple

A man was beaten so badly only because he asked for his salary. (Lots of people can’t get paid for years of hard working)

Boy don’t cry

A grand father is wiping off the tears from his grand son. (In China, many family have to be separated, the parents has to go out to make a living, and leave their children along at home with their grandfather, grandmother)

Boy don’t cry II

Strong

In Yangzi river, some ship transportation are still powered on human being.

Rainman

An old man sit on the rain. (it’s very possibly he is a newspaper seller or a gatekeepers for the bikes in the street)

Father and son

A father with his son in the arms are selling his home brewed vegetable.  
 

A professor

This old man looks like the poor people above, but he is a professor in a famous University.  He donated his all to poor students and support them to get educated, he lead a very thrifty life life style since professor in China don’t get paid that much.

Sun shine on the faces

The sun shine reflect on the faces of a poor family.

 

Street artist

Young children were trained to performance dangerous acrobatics, they have to perform on the street and get very little money to make a living.

 

Hungry

A hungry child is eating the wasted cake on the street corner.

 

Working teen girl

She makes money herself for studying.  Everyday after school, she goes to a factory to carry good, she carry 40KG and makes CNY 0.03 for each time.  (CNY 0.03 is equal to USD 0.004)

 

Grandfather cried

A grand father cried after he know his grandsons could come back to school.  (In China, the only hope to change a poor life is get educated and find a job)

 
 

A village school teacher

A young mom carrying her baby and teaching in a village primary school

Popularity: 63% [?]

Barack Obama on my Linkedin. :)

Social Network September 13th, 2007

image

I believe the social network will be a sharp tool for the president 2008. Today when I open up linked in, I found Barack Obama was there. He seemed to be my 3rd degree "friend".

Popularity: 27% [?]

A Farewell to"Don’t be evil" — Google.cn banned a common Chinese people name.

China Today, Google August 26th, 2007

Just read from a friend’s twitter update that Google.cn has banned a Chinese name "Shijing(石靖)". I tried to search that name in google.cn, here is what I got:

Google 首页

无法访问您所搜索的信息,请返回 google.cn 查询其它信息.

The above Chinese is: "Access denied for the information you are searching, please back to google.cn to search other information".

The name "Shijing" is a very common Chinese name for male or female, maybe in China there are around several hundred thousands of people are named as "Shijing". However, for google China, they not exist any more.

"Shijing" became a popular search keyword in the last couple weeks because someone discovered her naked photo were appeared in an American idiot Robert Kugler’s online photo album. That guy post many Chinese girl’s photo(include some naked) in his myspace pages, and declared that he  had sex with lots of Chinese women and post those photo to show off. All I can say for this is, that stupid guy is a complete idiot, he should pay price for what he did( Publishing private photos to public without permission).

No doubt, it’s because some department of our government’s pressure, generally they just ask a web site to remove any thing they want to remove, they don’t care what they are and how they related to the daily life.

Since Google launched a self censored web site: Google.cn, she was blamed a lot in Chinese "google fans", many people feel they were betrayed or cheated by google’s famous slagon "don’t be evil". As a person who ever ran a web site in China, I am a few of people who support the self censored version google — "google.cn", it’s not possible to fight with a government like China when you decided to do business in China. Open a self censored google.cn is a win-win situation for both google and google users. However those self secorship only related to those political related content and some sexual/pornographic contents.

But this time is complete different, this is the first time google banned a keyword completely (without display anything!), and this keyword is not related to any political terms, it’s just a common name that several hundred thousands of people are sharing! I believe it is so "EVIL" for those people who using this name or they have some relative who using this name.

Goodbye, "don’t be evil", I believe it’s  only a start point that google China become far and far away from what it said before.

(Chinese version: 和谐了的谷歌算Evil呢还是不Evil呢?)

Popularity: 34% [?]

Skype was back, but their excuse sucks.

IP Phone, Internet August 21st, 2007

Skype was down some days ago, now it’s back, but what their excuse really sucks:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

It’s because Windows update?! Skype’s P2P network stability relays on Microsoft Windows Update?! What an excuse !!!

Here is what they explained more technically:

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Well, it’s reasonable, however it still means Skype have a weak design in stability and redundency which is really critical for a telecommunication carrier. Even though, unfortunately, they are still feeling so  "proud"…

We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide.

Well, this world have plenty of choices, this is not 3 years ago…now GIPS codec are widely used by most of VoIP softwares, and there is no secret about how to make AEC better and "so called P2P voip" network. Maybe GizmoProject is a better choice:

Gizmo is a Free Phone for Your Computer

That makes calling as easy as instant messaging

Gizmo Project is an internet telephone, that is as simple as instant messaging

Make all of your calls from the comfort of your desktop, with Gizmo Project it is point, click, talk. For FREE

Why use Gizmo?

Gizmo is a free phone for your computer

Popularity: 32% [?]

Bring Internet freedom to China? GFW will say NO!

Internet August 19th, 2007

I just read a blog post “How to bring Internet freedom to China” from Patrick Fitzsimmons, he suggest  to host the web server on the domain of a critical business site, so China goverment will not block those web site:

 The solution is to host the web server on the domain of a critical business site. A huge number of Chinese businesses run off of Microsoft services. When I spent time in China, most of the people I met used Microsoft Hotmail for their email - work and personal. Block Hotmail and the government cripples tens of millions of people going about their daily business. Other business critical web sites include American corporate sites, such as Microsoft Update, Google, PayPal, and Chase Manhattan Bank. The government cannot ban those services without suffering severe economic repercussions.

An of Congress should require that all major US companies doing business with China host proxy servers on their domains. A person in China would simply go to https://www.hotmail.com/FreeInternet/ and be able to access the entire web without restriction. By using the secure “https” protocol, the “FreeInternet” part of the address would be encrypted. Thus the Chinese government would have absolutely no way of detecting whether the user was using the free internet or sending a business email. Chinese citizens would be completely free to write blogs, read foreign news, and engage in political discourse all with complete security and anonymity.

Even without an act of Congress, we in free countries can create these proxy services by convincing the right organizations to host the servers on their domains. Domains such as apache.org or mozilla.org would be very difficult for China to block without doing severe damage to their software industry. We could build a movement to host proxy servers on these types of domains.

Firstly, as a Chinese who deep sufered by the Great Fire Wall (GFW), I should say thanks to Patrick, thank him gave a solution to bring Internet freedom  to China.

However,  unfortunately, this idea totally can’t work, even if the US goverment can push company to provide such proxy, or a great amount of company willing to do so, it still helpless:

  • Greate Fire Wall can easily block partial web site based on the URL pattern. That’s to say even all popular web site implement a “/proxy/…” service for us, those part could be easily wiped off by our Great Fire Wall.
  •  ”Block Hotmail and the government cripples tens of millions of people going about their daily business”, yes, but will our GFW care a shit?! NO, they don’t care. They blocked Google, the blocked Sourceforge, they blocked FreeBSD, they blocked Wikipedia, … Any thing which threaten the interests of GFW will be blocked, no matter how many people may be affected. Unfortunately, that’s the situation in China.
  • Will those “big” company be so kind to provide such proxy? No, I don’t think so.  Actually, I never expect them to be this good, I only wish they could not sell us to the government…but unfortunately they did, just no too long ago, Yahoo provided  personal email content to our government and eventually become a evident to put someone in prison! Even google surrened, they run a selfcensored version google  “google.cn” in China.
  • How about apache.org, mozilla.org ? No, please not, even they willing to so, I believe many Chinese people wish NOT!  because all we know that only make us lost apache and mozilla in the future forever! At least now we can still access them easily.

Internet freedom is not a technical problem, so technical solution may not so easy to help.

At last, I should still say thanks to Patrick, let’s pray that some day in the future, free Internet access will not just a dream anymore.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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