Indonesian Web 2.0: Social networking sites

Features – September 03, 2007

Budi Putra, Jakarta, Contributor

One day on a foggy morning in June 2006, Felix Widjaja finally found what he was looking for. After seeking and considering various start-up models on his desktop computer at his home in Pluit, North Jakarta, the 26-year-old decided to establish a start-up company that would develop social networking sites.

Following the “discovery”, he needed a couple days to formulate exactly what kind of social networking site he wanted to develop.

Felix revealed that the first idea that came to mind was a kind of social music network, but a similar service was already available, like Last.fm. The site provides a service that keeps track of the music you listen to, then produces a large number of personalized features.

Still frustrated by his belated idea of a social music network, Felix then considered creating a so-called social Internet history sharing. His friends told him it was a crazy idea — but no, it’s not, since ZDNet has launched a similar service called Cluztr (cluztr.com).

The third idea, a micro-blogging service, also met with the same fate: a start-up has already introduced a similar idea in Twitter (twitter.com).

“The launch of Twitter felt just like doomsday for me,” Felix told The Jakarta Post. “I felt frustrated, and I decided to stop here. Enough.”

But he didn’t want to give up. The popular social networking site, MySpace, was launched after Friendster, but MySpace became the bigger hit.

Moreover, Felix’s original idea was a little bit different from Twitter. The freelance Web designer wanted to develop an emoticon-based social mood management site — not short-posting like Twitter.

“Spartans never retreat!” was his motto.

“I was always having difficulties in knowing what my friends were doing. I wanted to know their moods fast.

“I wanted to create a good personal mood management, a log, a quick and easy application for managing and sharing my short logs,” said the graduate of Jakarta’s Bina Nusantara University.

The R&D on the project continued, and a mock-up was completed in October 2006. After almost one month spent pulling his hair in search of a domain, the project was officially named: MoodMill (moodmill.com).

“Due to a lack of spare time, the project was abandoned for nearly three months. I was thinking that MoodMill really needed more developers, especially a decent designer and a programmer,” said Felix.

The situation at that time was 80 percent coding, and 0 percent designing.

According to Felix, the search for a dream team didn’t go so smoothly.

“One local ex-colleague designer said no, another ex-colleague designer never gave an answer. And one well-respected Australian designer said yes, but he didn’t work out, eventually.”

Finally, when Christine joined MoodMill, Felix decided to stop searching for additional designers.

“Then we both shared the tasks and responsibilities. She would focus on the code, and I’d take care of the design and marketing.”

His dream came true on April 12, 2007, when the service was officially launched.

“Today, we have more than 1,000 members,” he said.

What did MoodMill achieve?

Felix’s work got some good reviews from several online sites. The respected ReadWriteWeb (readwriteweb.com), wrote: “A newbie in this crowd, MoodMill is more of a Twitter hybrid than a truly new experience. Still, it’s a bit of fun for the emoticon addicts out there and does well what it is made to do.”

Prompted by MoodMill’s birth, Indonesia has moved beyond the blogosphere: The country is entering the new world of Web 2.0 services.

The most interesting thing is that all services are designated to be based in Indonesia — a newly emerging market in the region.

According to Wikipedia, “Web 2.0” refers to a perceived second generation of Web-based communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — the latter of which helps facilitate collaboration and sharing among its users.

Several user-generated content services — as opposed to publisher- or owner-generated content like news portals and common websites — have been launched already, and the IT community appears to have responded to them enthusiastically.

The country’s new services include micro-blogging services such as MoodMill and Kronologger (kronologger.com); social networking sites like Fupei (fupei.com), Temanster (temanster.com) and AkuCintaSekolah (akucintasekolah.com); and multimedia-sharing sites like LayarTancap (layartancap.com) and SharingFoto (sharingfoto.com).

Also called a mobile blogging service, Kronologger allows users to short-post what you are doing and where you are.

The next development of Indonesia’s Twitter-like service would be its integration with SMS. Kronologger users will be able to read, post, and even sign up via SMS.

“It makes the service so real-time. That’s the elegance of micro-blogging,” said Kronologger programmer Kukuh T. Wicaksono.

Fupei, Temanster and AkuCintaSekolah are exploring social-networking capabilities among the country’s Internet users.

While Fupei and Temanster are focused on exploring their member-based friends network, AkuCintaSekolah is asking members to find classmates through the social network.

Layartancap.com is Indonesia’s YouTube, while SharingFoto tries to repeat the success of Yahoo’s photo-sharing site, Flickr.

Since these services are all hosted in Indonesia, uploading videos and photos are much easier, and is driving many users to join them.

These new developments indicate that Indonesian local content has grown rapidly. And since all content is placed with local hosting providers, of course it can save Internet bandwidth significantly.

Despite the fact that the Indonesia’s Web 2.0 services are mostly cloned off international service models, the potential exists to develop and explore them for the local market.

It’s not easy to create truly original services in this field, and the real competition lies in creating an appropriate business model and in attracting the community.

Social networking and blogging services are indeed a global trend that have already changed the face of business and the media industry, but content and audience of the phenomenon tend to be local.

Internet users prefer to talk and share with who they already know or with those they meet across the virtual network.

This is why users need to express themselves on social networking/blogging sites — and why user-generated content services have successfully gained momentum.

It’s nice to see that Indonesia has joined the party.