Jollibee "Sex" Scandal

Jollibee responds to PR nightmare on YouTube.

Is Eskwela.com biting Friendster.com's market?

I was invited AJ Batac to try out Eskwela.com's open beta testing about 2 weeks ago, i heared of this site already months ago and the name itself gives a hint on its offerings. Eskwela is just like Facebook but it's still rough on the edges, notably the site make use of AJAX alot which makes the user experience very Web 2.0. Undeniably it's target market are Filipino students and alumni, IMHO its a great way to start since most of us was at one-time a student thus connecting with our roots in schools is the best way to link up. Although there's a much heated debate about the site's tag line and a sharp critic on its functionality, this is truly unavoidable due to its beta nature so i will refrain from anymore of that on this post.

However there is one serious issue to consider, is Eskwela.com after Friendster.com's market?

Friendster's target audience is the entire population of the world, mostly ranging from students to working professional. However because MySpace has already captured most of the US and UK audiences, Friendster prospered on Asia especially on the Philippines. It is reported on a case study conducted by Friendster that their Philippine based users contributed to its growth equally compared to all their other users put together in the whole world.

How will Eskwela's entry into the market affect Friendster's growth?

Let's compare the two model's together. Friendster is modelled upon social networking of
people, since everyone in the world is connected within 6 degrees of acquaintance. Eskwela on the other hand is modelled on similarity of attributes between people such as schools, hobbies, etc. Most Filipino spends 14 early years of his/her life in school, making school its second home where we develop our primary values, ideologies, sense of membership. Coupled with Filipino traits that values family and friendship, Eskwela is on the right track on reuniting as well as affirming bonds between each Filipinos.

Why might Eskwela's succeed where Friendster failed?

It is still a very early to tell how Eskwela will grow but how it is likely succeed compared to Friendster is already answered by Eskwela's tag line: 100% Pinoy. Friendster's network was built on rough fragile bonds of friendship built on occasional and distant degree of acquaintances while Eskwela is based on strong rooted relationship that lasted for avaerage of 14 years and there's no other people on the world would understand that than the people that built Eskwela.com; a 100% Pinoy and not by Americans who built Friendster and who's social bonds are built less that what we Filipino's have. That's why there are a lot of fake profile's now on Friendster, this is a sign that people are desperately searching for something with stronger bonds to affirm.

Will Eskwela learn from past mistakes?

I sure hope Eskwela will not make the same mistake as Facebook, Friendster or Alumni.net; but after a quick look at Eskwela.com team member's list; oh its Terence Pua! The same guy who made Friendster classifieds (formerly Pusit.com acquired by Friendster) possible.

I'm more assured now mistakes will not happen twice :)

Root Meeee: Linux Virtualization on WinXP

I had another itch to try something crazy so i tried installing a virtual OS on Windows XP.

I tried Ubuntu at first but my PC just couldn't take it and keeps on hanging so i settled for Damn Small Linux which is based on Knoppix/Debian. Im pretty pleased with its speed considiring im running it with just 5Gig Virtual HD and 128Mb Virtual Memory using QEMU. I can run in on background with all my usual heavy duty WinXP apps also running; keeping it at 11% CPU usage which is amazing considering im running an entire OS compared to some of my WinXP apps that takes up alot of CPU power by just idling.

Kudus to DSL and QEMU developers!

Build your own meebo.. or even better!

After being dunk from an office party, i decided to sleep over at my desk rather than go home but couldnt fall asleep. So i decided i'll do some far off experiment Txtdomain once again.. i set my goal to replicating Meebo (or atleast some part of it); don't get me wrong here, I dont hate Meebo. I think it's very cool and im always using it whenever im not at the office.

To cut my work short i Googled, found Jabberd2 easy enough as my Jabber/IM server and a few more scripts downloaded to support bindings to other transport. Then i caught a snag when I tried using purely PHP and Apache to connect to Jabberd2 so i decided to go Java with Tomcat since i was already able to make a Jabber Bot earlier with JivesSoftware.

It took me a while on how to handle cross server authentication without sacrificing security, so ive settled for one time embeddable javascript to pass the data plus it is protected by a session based login. Since i freely control the passwords i made them dynamic so Txtdomain will pick a random password every time a user logs-in then change it to something else again when the user logs-out. I could have deleted the Jabber account but i wanted the users to recieve offline messages as well.

In the end it took me 15 hours to finish the experiment and embed in into our Txtdomain site. I'll try to write a howto later when i have the time, i will also try using eJabberd instead of Jabberd2.

Check out the screen shot, SMS to IM and even to GoogleTalk! Now to think of it, it does sounds more like a Chikka competitor rather than for Meebo :P