Thursday, April 10, 2008 Ng: Simple or complicated? By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
MOST people in Asia prefer Friendster. However, Friendster has been overtaken by MySpace.com three years ago, and lately, (although Myspace is still number one), it seems Facebook is gaining fast.
According to the IT Facts by Zdnet, MySpace grew only four percent compared in February 2008 compared to the same month in 2007. Facebook, on the other hand, grew 102 percent year-on-year.
If you are a member of Facebook, you will notice it has plenty of diversions.
This is because Facebook has an open API, and thousands of other third-party entities develop applications that run inside Facebook. This has made the platform very rich in terms of experience. You can twitter inside Facebook, chat, play games, and share photos, videos or feeds.
Most Web 2.0 websites have realized that for them to gain a huge following, they should offer customization and different experiences for people who have varied preferences.
But the one thing that makes websites attractive is ease of use. According to Nielsen, LinkedIn comes third in networking. You cannot share photos in Linkedin, engage in jokes or poke around, but it is the preferred site of many business people. Some people have predicted that LinkedIn will not prosper because it can do only a fraction of what Facebook can do, but nevertheless it grew by over 271 percent last year, even though its membership is roughly a third of Face-book.
So what does LinkedIn do? It tries to be simple and not too complicated. It makes sure that what it does, it does very well. I have seen people spend hours just inside Facebook, but most business people want to do their stuff and get it over with; so they want a platform that is simple and allows them to do what they want to do in a few minutes, without diversions and complexities.
There are two things that we always try to achieve in technology—ease of use is paramount but in the end, we prefer what our friends prefer, and we stick to things that have become our habits. This is why several years after Friendster fell out of favor in most parts of the world, it is still the networking place of choice in the Philippines and many parts of Asia—because your friends are there! This may also explain why almost 80 percent or 90 percent of people I know have Yahoo as their email address.
After all, when friends consult each other how to get email, they share what they know, and that is to get a Yahoo email. This also explains, for example, why Google Orkut is successful only in Brazil.
I remember an article in the Philippine Star, which stated that the Philippines now has an overabundance of nurses. In fact, we have more than 600,000 nursing students all over the country. A few years ago, hospitals were reported to be short of nurses because everybody went abroad. The Philippine Star columnist reported that many hospitals now have a lot of nurses willing to do volunteer work since they could not find jobs or go abroad.
What about technology? Despite the economic slowdown in the US, the high-tech industry reported that in 2007, there were 91,400 new ICT (information and communications technology) jobs. Although this was less than the 139,000 jobs created in 2006, the figures is way above the 87,400 jobs in 2005.
Software services continue to be the main sector with 82,600 new jobs in 2007. Of course, in the light of more and more jobs being outsourced, it does seem that the united States and developed countries are still looking for more and more high-tech people.
If I were to chose, I would enrol in an IT-related course come June.
