1 Articles for 'Magtoo'
- 2008/06/16 Open Social Conference Korea 2008 (4)
On June 13, I was at the OpenSocial Conference '08. Here's my coverage:
The 450-capacity auditorium was packed – showing the high interest in open platform technologies. First up was the keynote by Chul-soo Ahn, the president of Ahnlab and a professor at KAIST teaching entrepreneurship. His keynote was about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and in Korea - a rather classic topic, but more relevant as Ahn has just come back from the Valley after being there for years. He asserted that Korean entrepreneurs and startup employees should be more focused rather than being "generalists"; also that Korean venture capital should not be a mere "money-loaning bank".
Next, Hyunsoo Hwang, a manager at Cyworld gave a talk about Cyworld and the open internet. Interesting he should say about Cyworld and the open internet as the service is widely regarded as a rather closed service... Anyways, he said Cyworld is trying to implement open data interchange with third parties - For example, if you write a book review on Cyworld's minihompy, the same review might one day also appear on the online bookstore's website.
What I found interesting was Hwang's talk on the social network monetization. Hwang said that the reason why contextual ads work very well on internet search is because the service knows the user's intention. So that means if there's a way social networks can also capture people's intention right (which should be very challenging), then he doesn't see why contextual ads on social networks should not work well too.
It is well known that Cyworld is actually one of only few social network services around the world that generate enough profit, by selling digital items such as background music or avatars. It's interesting that Cyworld seems to be focusing on improving search experience these days - Has Cyworld's digital items revenue hit the wall or something? Is Cyworld interested in generating search-related revenues, such as contextual ads? I don't know..
Traditionally, Cyworld's hottest service has been photo album. But lately, Cyworld diary, a short-form blog of sort, has picked up significant usage. Probably the same reason why Twitter has been popular - people are busier, and they want quick and easy writing over putting up pics.
It turns out that 60% of Cyworld visits occur among 1-chon (i.e. friends) while 40% among non-friends. These statistics from one of the major social networks of the world verifies that social networks are mostly for strengthening the relationships among those who already know each other.
In another session, Kyosuk Song Andy Kyoseok Song at Ahnlab introduced IDtail, the first Korean service (and the fourth in the world) that fully implemented open social. I've heard unofficially quite a few times that this service is one of the best practices (if not the best) of open social technologies.
IDTail is basically a Linkedin-like service an OpenSocial-based social network service. It's an open social container into which various open social apps can be plugged. Song said that after rolling out open social apps, IDtail's unique visitors increased by 250%.
In the following session, Sangsuk Lee of 3Cim Korea shared some "inside stories" related to open social. This interesting Korean startup is based in Silicon Valley and in Korea, and runs a photo widget service called MagToo and MagShow.
After developing application based in open social, they say that opensocial's promise of “Write once, run everywhere” should be taken with a grain of salt – different service providers have different specs, and for their own case, they could launch only on Myspace despite working for over 4 months on Opensocial. But they say Open Social certainly cuts down the development time.
Their application, Magshow, shows well what an OpenSocial application can do; Magshow allows Facebook or other social network users to display all their friends' pictures in one place (such as under profile) without having to visit each one's page.
The 450-capacity auditorium was packed – showing the high interest in open platform technologies. First up was the keynote by Chul-soo Ahn, the president of Ahnlab and a professor at KAIST teaching entrepreneurship. His keynote was about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and in Korea - a rather classic topic, but more relevant as Ahn has just come back from the Valley after being there for years. He asserted that Korean entrepreneurs and startup employees should be more focused rather than being "generalists"; also that Korean venture capital should not be a mere "money-loaning bank".
Next, Hyunsoo Hwang, a manager at Cyworld gave a talk about Cyworld and the open internet. Interesting he should say about Cyworld and the open internet as the service is widely regarded as a rather closed service... Anyways, he said Cyworld is trying to implement open data interchange with third parties - For example, if you write a book review on Cyworld's minihompy, the same review might one day also appear on the online bookstore's website.
What I found interesting was Hwang's talk on the social network monetization. Hwang said that the reason why contextual ads work very well on internet search is because the service knows the user's intention. So that means if there's a way social networks can also capture people's intention right (which should be very challenging), then he doesn't see why contextual ads on social networks should not work well too.
It is well known that Cyworld is actually one of only few social network services around the world that generate enough profit, by selling digital items such as background music or avatars. It's interesting that Cyworld seems to be focusing on improving search experience these days - Has Cyworld's digital items revenue hit the wall or something? Is Cyworld interested in generating search-related revenues, such as contextual ads? I don't know..
Traditionally, Cyworld's hottest service has been photo album. But lately, Cyworld diary, a short-form blog of sort, has picked up significant usage. Probably the same reason why Twitter has been popular - people are busier, and they want quick and easy writing over putting up pics.
It turns out that 60% of Cyworld visits occur among 1-chon (i.e. friends) while 40% among non-friends. These statistics from one of the major social networks of the world verifies that social networks are mostly for strengthening the relationships among those who already know each other.
In another session, Kyosuk Song Andy Kyoseok Song at Ahnlab introduced IDtail, the first Korean service (and the fourth in the world) that fully implemented open social. I've heard unofficially quite a few times that this service is one of the best practices (if not the best) of open social technologies.
IDTail is basically a Linkedin-like service an OpenSocial-based social network service. It's an open social container into which various open social apps can be plugged. Song said that after rolling out open social apps, IDtail's unique visitors increased by 250%.
In the following session, Sangsuk Lee of 3Cim Korea shared some "inside stories" related to open social. This interesting Korean startup is based in Silicon Valley and in Korea, and runs a photo widget service called MagToo and MagShow.
After developing application based in open social, they say that opensocial's promise of “Write once, run everywhere” should be taken with a grain of salt – different service providers have different specs, and for their own case, they could launch only on Myspace despite working for over 4 months on Opensocial. But they say Open Social certainly cuts down the development time.
Their application, Magshow, shows well what an OpenSocial application can do; Magshow allows Facebook or other social network users to display all their friends' pictures in one place (such as under profile) without having to visit each one's page.
