Verecom Web Design Blog

Speaking of social networking website, many people will immediately think of Facebook or MySpace. But in fact In addition to these friend making, entertainment social networking website, there are more professional or commercial orientation websites, which Among them, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the outstanding one.

Founded in May 2003, LinkedIn is growing rapidly since past few years, and becomes a favourite website for white-collar and business people to connect and make industry friends with similar business background. TechCrunch reported that according to science and technology media, LinkedIn’s rapidly growing number of members and recently has more than 60 million members registered.

As the Business Social is more important for many professional people, including hiring, cooperation and other business acts require a social networking platform for the coordination of inter-personal, hence make LinkedIn becomes popular. In December last year, the number of members is 55 million, but there are 5 million new members registered during January this year, which shows a strong potential in this site!

LinkedIn actively expand its global market, recently it set up two offices in India and Netherlands, and that it will soon expand the business to the world’s major countries.

Edited By Henry Lu

At start, Facebook is the network address book for U.S. College students, students must provide true information to register. Since its beginning in 2004, it quickly became a popular platform for college students to exchange information. From 2006, Facebook opens registration for all users around the world. Based on the characteristics of the real personal information, hence now Facebook becomes great tool to look for lost friends.

This is the answer of Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook founder, was repeatedly stressed that the spirit of Facebook: Facebook is not only a tool to make friend, but also give an extension of the real interpersonal relationship to the internet. Facebook’s strength lies on the ability to help users to find friend they already know in real life in the internet world.

First of all, Facebook provides search engine to find friends. When users register Facebook account, they need to provide birthday, gender and background information which may includes the location of high school, universities, research institutes or career background. Then Facebook can use this information to find persons with similar background as reference for users to add in the contact list.

Simpler way is that Facebook can search user’s email address book to find out any person who already in his contact list. This ensures that in future, if any people you know join Facebook, he will find you immediately.

Also Facebook can check your friend list, if you and other user both have same friend list, Facebook will put this user in the “You may know” list, which let you expand friends circle easily. Because these convenient tools, Facebook users can build their friend circles much faster than other social network sites and users increase the friends list easier.

In addition, Facebook offers great variety of applications and games for users. Users can add new game every day, or shared popular games with friends. When Facebook offers more interactive games, it forms a special social model, and through these activities, you can keep in touch with friends and even with someone you are not familiar.

Tracing mechanism with social games, Facebook provides pleasant time, even if you online for long time, it will not be bored.

Edited By Henry Lu

As the founder of Digg, Kevin Pose has been known for his great passion towards micro-blog. Before Twitter, which has millions followers in the web world, he also used to be founder of Pownce, a website which has very similar function as Digg. Although Powence has closed now, but Kevin’s zeal towards micro-blog didn’t change, recently, he launched Twitter user-generated directory site named Wefollow (http://wefollow.com/).

Do you want to join Wefollow through your Twitter ID? It is simple, you just need to send a message to @wefollow with three self-describe labels (such as blog, music, baseball), your ID will be listed in Wefollow user database immediately. On Wefollow site, you can find the topics you are interested very easily, and you can also find out the Twitter ID which has most followers. It is like a social-media human power database.

Edited By Vicky Yin

The Integration of Local Based Service (LBS) targets the potential of $13 billion dollars market, is expected to bring large sums of revenue to social network website.

ABI Research pointed out that Local Based Service (LBS) market is expected to grow more than 13 billion dollars with 5 years, and Facebook and MySpace these two social network website will be important driving force.

With more and more network functions on the cell phone, mobile social network applications become very popular. Research firm estimates that by 2013, more than 82 million people will connect to the social network website by using mobile devices.

Facebook and MySpace are the two largest social network giants, and both eager to start on the mobile phone market. Facebook’s iPhone applications have already been top downloaded software, while there are 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace’s Blackberry service within one month.

However, both of social network sites have not yet integrate geographic information to mobile applications, which also let some smaller social network website, like Loopt and Brightkite have survive space. But experts believe that soon Facebook and MySpace will develop numbers of LBS, such as the search for a friend, geographical indications (geo-tagging), and the integration of LBS will be a new profit source for social network site.

“Multimedia-oriented GPS mobile phone is the mainstream of industry, but other types of mobile phone is also very important,” ABI Research director Dominique Bonte said in a statement: “The concept of mobile networking through built-in GPS receiver has become practical, for example, The local based information service from GYPSii can support Moblin-based Intel Atom MID. ”

Bonte also said navigation devices will be the best choice for location-based internet service. For example, the navigation from Japanese car maker Nissan’s Carwing car can allow users to share information like car fuel consumption detail.

Edited By Henry Lu

This is a really good question, especially to the web masters. Even you have a good idea, a good team, but the key of succuss is determined by whether web users like your website or not. There are millions of web users over the world, how can the web masters know whether their ideas can find the favour of the web users or not.

Normally before we decide to start the E-business, firstly we will tell the basic ideas and plan to the friends and relatives around us and ask for their opinions. But if the opinions are highly diverse, we might feel even more confused. In this situation, the most secure way is to make a big scale marketing survey. And then make an ideally best service gradually according to the result of this marketing survey. However, the cost of this method may be far beyond what a new company can afford. Maybe we can assume the possible online behaviours according to our past experience. But in Australia, there are millions of web users; it is really a problem that how much the personal experience can reflect the online habits of the whole Australia web users.

Under this dilemma, we have other option. First we use our experience as the foundation and with our new ideas to write the whole program in the shortest time. We do not need to think too much after we complete it, just launch the very original website and let the users start to play with it. And then modify and improve the website services according to their direct responses. At the same time, we also need to the set the measurement for each factor which will determine the success of the website, for example: the drop off rate of the website, average number of pages people browse, register shifting rate and so on. This is really a long improvement processing, because the online behaviours might be very different from what we expect at the beginning. It also happens very often that the reality conflicts with our ideals, but as long as we remember “to change web user’s online habits is far more difficult than just following it” we can always find the method very soon.

During the processing of growth, you will find that it is very interesting and exciting to let the users feel they are growing with the website services. Website is a living body; you don’t need to set too much boundaries at the first place. In the process of gathering the people, let them also feel that the services are keeping moving forwards. Once a web users told me that the greatest fun of using these web 2.0 website to him is not just from the functions the websites have provided but from the growth of the website, the websites always adjust the functions and modify the flow very frequently and very quickly, this makes him always find the surprise whenever he logs in the website.

Just as we mentioned before, “who knows what kind of web service the users like?” You never know and neither do I. The response of each service will be different due to the difference of their target groups. Only when the web masters really put the ideas to website and let the users really used it, play with it, then they will tell the web masters whether this is the thing they want or not.

Do you have good idea? Don’t think too much, quickly put it online! Thousands of web users will give you the sincerest and most instant response and opinions.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Now blog has become more and more important in online sales. Many companies and online business owners have achieved great success through using the blog well. There are uncountable examples you can hear about that.

Then, what are the good things blog can bring to sales? Actually blog can fulfill all the following purposes AT ONCE.

1. Improve search engine ranking
If you use the key words, hyperlinks skillfully, and update the articles regularly, then surely you can increase the media exposure on some main search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, and ultimately improve your ranking.

2. Save sales cost
You can reduce your expense on traditional sales methods, like making advertisement, finding sponsors.

3. More closer to the potential clients
One of the most essential things for the future growing of the company is to locate the potential customers who are not easy to access. However, a dynamic, opened, and rich blog can reach the potential clients using the method, which is irreplaceable for the other tools, easily.

4. Be the evidence for company to use in making sales decision
Blog can receive customers’ responses and market information at the first moment and help the company to make the right business decision based on highly accurate information.

5. Grow brand loyalty among your customers
Blog can help the clients and business mates to know the company movements; this is the best way to allow the clients to keep their motivation to communicate with the company.

6. Grow your volunteer promoters
Every reader visit your blog are doing this by his own will. They are willing to interact with your business and grain more information from your blog. This powerful method of communication can grow a group of people who are willing to promote your company and your products.

7. More effective marketing survey and product testing tools:
One of the reasons why blog became more and more popular in online business is that it can change marketing survey and products testing tools into one-to-one interacted communication.

On your blog, you can not only post the articles introduce your products and business, but also your reflections, the stories of the company, the sharing of your administration experience, even the reviews of the movie you like.

You don’t need to worry about that your blog is not “commercial” enough, the benefit it will bring to you can be more than the “practical reasons” we mentioned before: it helps you to expand your society circle, let you have chance to learn from your seniors and even built your company image and create the company culture…

When blog truly enter into your life, when no matter you open the computer, firstly you will check blog traffic and new comments then we can say an important seed of online sales has truly been put into your heart, and this small seed may grow into a big tree with great fruit in the future.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Web2.0 has been a hot topic in recent years, from website to sales and to investment, everything has been put the name of web 2.0. Actually the concept of 2.0 was originally from release 2.0, the book of Esther Dyson, an American author. Later on an e-business magazine called business 2.0 was issued in US and the name was borrowed by web users in 2004. They used Web 2.0 this term to describe the situation that web industry has recovered from the deep valley of 2000But now instead of focusing on Web 2.0, more people interested about the coming Web 3.0. What it will look like? When it will come?

In the end of 2007, the number of online users all over the world has reached 1,200 millions. To this group of people, the possible direction of Web 3.0 may follow the next big application or the change of the net world. It is obvious that “mobile network” or “wireless network” may be the most possible direction for Web 3.0. Since Tim Berners Lee, an British computer scientist, invented web on 1989, it has been always applied on PC platform and all the services have been developed under PC environment as well.

The turning point of web dominant power shifting from US to East Asia

But PC is still too complicated; it can never be so instant available like mobile phone, this is also the reason why since 1999 mobile sales exceeded PC sales, the sales proportion of mobile and PC has reached 10:1. Therefore if web want to jump out of the screen on the desktop computer and involve more in people’s daily life, then the key is not on how perfectly it can work on PC but on how it can link with mobile phone or the another similar portable mobile tools closely.

Before, some people said that the screen on mobile phone was too small, but since the flip phone and slide phone have been released, the screen on mobile is enlarged greatly; some said that transfer speed of mobile phone was too slow, but now, we have WiFi and 3G; some said that the keyboard on mobile phone was too small to write email, but Blackberry has been fully accepted even by US customers; some said that mobile screen was not good for reading e-book, but currently Amazon.com has released a new electronic reader, called Kindle. It looks very like a mobile phone and it maybe the first step to make the E-book for mobile.

In a word, since mobile have been widely accepted as multifunction electronic product, now most barriers are only technical problems. Solving technical problems is much easier than changing people’s mind-set. Especially in East Asia, the speed of mobile network development in Japan and Korea is fastest in the world, and China may be the nation has biggest mobile online users population in the future, as they already have greatest number mobile users in the world: nearly 500 millions.

Web 3.0 will not just mean to transfer the technology from PC to mobile phone, but it will be the turning point of web dominant power shifting from US to East Asia. Of course there are some other factors we have to take into account. In China, mobile phone operators have too much power, comparing with them, the other parties in the whole industry chain are in a very inferior position. This situation is definitely not good to develop innovation services.

China needs to deregulate telecommunications industry

China needs to take one step further in open its market, not matter in giving licenses or sales. They should follow the example of US. In 1996, US passed Telecom Act, it greatly deregulated the industry, this is how later the internet industry can develop so greatly. Recently when US started to discussed about internet 2, most people agree to divide net providers from service providers, and let these two parties focus on their own duties.

This can be a good chance for China to have a leap in both National Competitiveness and Individual Productive Power. But we should not be over optimistic, because it relates to state-owned enterprises reformation and opening franchise rights, these are the issues can not be solve in one night. However, iphone have entered Chinese market, and 3G has opened after Beijing Olympic Games. Web 3.0 surely will come.

Edited By Vicky Yin