The most common formula for a successful product now seems to be a great gadget with high quality "content" that fit together perfectly. It's easy to make some examples such as Apple iPod, Apple iPhone or Amazon Kindle.

• iPod is a portable music player designed with big storage and high usability. It can play low-cost and high-quality songs distributed via iTunes easily. In other words, iPod has changed the way people buy and listen to music.
• iPhone, a smart phone with technologies ahead of its time such as multi-touch screen, accelerometer (or at least these technologies had not gone mass before). But one of the main reasons make it a successful product is that it's not only a phone, it's also a great platform for developers to make beautiful and functional applications distributed via App Store. What I can say is iPhone has made a style all around the world.
• Amazon Kindle is not only a great E-book reader but also a platform dedicated for digital media consumption. With electronic paper technology, Kindle beats many other kinds of e-book reader that have been released before. With tons of low-cost e-books which can be downloaded easily via Amazon Store, now Kindle is the number 1 e-book reader device although it's hard to say about other kinds of digital media in the future.

So what about the iPad which Apple just announced a few days ago? It seems to be a different story. iPad has a special concept when Steve Jobs positions it between Laptop and Smart Phone. This makes it have to fight with both.

In term of device, iPad is not really as great as iPod or iPhone at the time they were released. Beside of lacking specifications comparing with Laptop and Smart Phone (no keyboard, no camera, no standard ports, no GSM calling,...), hardly we can see real innovations from Apple here. Yes, I know why Apple only chooses "just enough" for their products (it's biz product design, not tech) but technologies and innovations of iPad are not enough to make people "wow" a lot during the presentation of Jobs. An incredible speed with low price due to A4 chip? Not enough even with normal users who already had an iPhone or a Macbook. Comparing with other tablet devices, iPad is also not really strong in competition.

So what about "content"? Content of iPad is mixed of iPod's, iPhone's and Kindle's but it's also not really great. iPad uses iPhone OS so all iPhone applications can run on it. But how these applications can beat powerful Windows and Linux applications? I know that many Apple fanbois still install Microsoft Office on their Mac although iWork already installed. And even Android applications are not less beautiful and functional than iPhone's. iBooks is also not strong enough to compare with Amazon both in quantity and quality.

In a conclusion, I can not say iPad will be a successful product or not but in my opinion, if it has any success, the success will not be as big as iPod's and iPhone's.

PS: I am thinking of a great device dedicated for information consumption especially user-generated content and focused on people's social graphs' updates. What do you think?

I love Street Photography, I love taking photos on streets though I am only an amateur. In fact, street photography does not require too much knowledge about this kind of art and you also don't need to care much on arrangement or light. The most important thing in street photography is Emotions. With any kind of camera, even point-and-shoot camera, you just go out and capture emotions on the street as they're in natural state.

At first, I thought that I have to capture people's faces because it's where emotions are expressed most clearly. But, you know, it's not easy to come closely without making people to lose their natural emotions especially in Asian countries like Vietnam. Although taking photos at close range is best in street photography because you can capture every single tiny emotions, I still realized that emotions are expressed through every parts of body, not only face. Even a person turning back to you, you can still capture his emotions through their movements, gait,... And not only human, even a tree can also reflect emotions around. Once I went out and took photos in bad weather, I noticed that not only people out there were in hurry through the head wind to come back home as soon as possible but also trees were oscillating to follow the wind for surviving. It's really incredible!

So the first lesson here is to capture others' emotions, to understand others' feel, you must have precise eyes which can grasp every single tiny behaviors from every parts, every sides, even what you usually think they don't have any emotion at all.

When I started street photographing, I usually went out and tried to find moments of emotions. Once, I kept walking until I was too tired and decided to take a rest in a small park. It's amazing that I took more photos there than all photos I had took before combined while walking on the streets. I realized that when walking and paying too much attention, I missed more great moments than I thought. Just choose a good place, a crowed corner, a park, a school gates,...you will see emotions are everywhere and easily to notice. I think it's serene state helps me to "see" others' feel around rather than walking everywhere and seeking them.

The second lesson I can say is emotions are everywhere around you, you don't need to seek for them, just a little bit sensitive to notice moments of changes and you will see a life full of emotions.

One thing I realized when sitting in a park and taking photos of people around is I had done this before but I didn't understand it. When I was sad, I usually went out to find a place where I could look people around then try to guess what they are thinking, what made them smile, what made them cry,...I thought I did that just to forget my sadness but it's more than that. I saw many great moments of emotions but I also failed to capture it. It's exactly the same as you fail to take a big chance although you know it's there.

The third lesson is you must keep your your sense working all the time and make it become your natural intuition if you want to capture great moments of emotions.

If you can do these three lessons well, undoubtedly you will be successful, successful not only in street photography but also in life.

I just read an interesting article on Hacker News: Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company.

To summarize, the article is to explain why the author sold his company. There are two main points in his opinions:

• People always consider to be "rich" or "king" (to have a lot of money to never have to work again or to build a lifestyle and personal identity).
• When the amount of money crosses a critical line, it changes your lifestyle a lot!

Here is his graph which reflects his second point:

I admit that all the points are so true in real life. People want to be free to do whatever they want to make them happy. But somehow it's only right with regular people. He used an example of Box Game to illustrate how amount of money affects your choice:

Imagine I have two opaque boxes. Box A contains $10. Box B has a 50% chance of containing $20, and a 50% chance of containing nothing at all. You pick either box and take whatever's inside. Which box do you pick?

and the difference when:

Now box A holds $5,000,000. Box B either holds $10,000,000 or nothing, 50/50 chance. Which do you pick?

Sure, most of us will choose box A. But like a comment on Hacker News, this only makes people like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates so extraordinary! They don't really care about "rich" or "king" (or look like that). They aim to change the world. In other word, they choose neither box A nor box B, they're looking for box X, Y or Z.

This story reminds me of an article of Paul Bucheit.

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform "miracles" -- things which violate the perceived rules.

Not everyone has the hacker mindset (society requires a variety of personalities), but wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth. Some of those people were content to simply find a truth, but others used their discoveries to hack the system, to transform the world.

Yes, there are always such persons have the hacker mindset like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg hacking systems, transforming the world and creating the future.

And you, you just follow the common rules or try to discover the actual rules? Which box do you pick?

Yesterday, Google just launched Social Bar as a part of Google Friend Connect. The bar enables users to comment on any page of the website as long as it has got Social Bar enabled. Brilliant! The bar is alot better than Members gadget which people have integrated since Google Friend Connect announced. From Social Web Blog, here are the features of the social bar:

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
• Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.

After integrating the “Social Bar” to my blog, here is my first thought:

• Google leaves so many options to integrate. It’s good but some are quite unvalued. Put the bar on top (disappeared whenever user scroll down) and enabling to comment on the entire site don’t make the site more social. It’s just like the members gadget and comment gadget in another format. So classic and This only makes me to miss the good old days when people were interested in dynamic websites.
• Viral ability is not really good. It’s so hiden and unatural. Although your activities are brought across the websites you have joined, your friends only can see your activities when click on your avatar on the bar or gadgets.

After all, Google has done a good job. You can check out the bar right in this blog and leave your comment via either worpress’s comment form or the comment gadget.

Watch the video below to know how to add the social bar to your website.

I admit I am a Google fanboy. That only makes me to miss the good old days of Google more. I know this time is hard for not only Google but also every companies. But it doesn’t mean that a company is willing to lose its philosophy to survive. The first thing of Google’s philosophy is not right anymore:

Focus on the user and all else will follow. From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site: The interface is clear and simple. Pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone. Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction. By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another.

Google’s products are being more and more complicated, many features have been added hastily and no more fine details. Maybe I am too sensitive but I feel Google is going down.

For me, 2008 was an eventful year with many incredible things. They’re really inspirational. To begin a new-year writing, here are my predictions for web in Vietnam next year. Feel free to comment and contribute to my list:

• Vietnamese bloggers will move to other blogging platforms when Yahoo! shutdown Yahoo! 360 which is the most popular blogging service in Vietnam now. The best choices are services based on Wordpress.
• Bloggers will be affected by the new blogging rules. Some bloggers may be held because of their violations as in the circular which has been released by Vietnamese goverment.
• User-generated content will move to other forms beside blogging, maybe podcast and video podcast. And the quality will be improved. Users will care more for authority,…
• The war among SNS in Vietnam is just beginning and we will not be able to know which will win next year. But they will compete with Facebook directly when it comes to Vietnam (It’s really coming). More niche SNS will be launched.
• Wifi will be everywhere in big cities and services in mobile will grow, from sms-based to something like mobile social networks.
• Not any significant movement in Vietnamese search engines.
• Economic crisis will affect VC and start-ups financing. Some services like products search, price comparison will be launched. E-Commerce will grow but still slowly.
• Social media (Blog, Social news, Wiki,…) will prove its role in media revolution in Vietnam.
• Online advertising will grow rapidly and more professional.
• Some big companies will come and do something for online market in Vietnam as Youtube did when they have put their servers in Vietnam to improve the loading speed for Vietnamese users.

There is was an interesting debate on Techmeme few days ago about authority-based Twitter searches. Loic Le Meur wants Twitter to rank searching results based on authority i.e number of followers and Mike ’s with him. But I totally disagree with this idea. Although the goal for finding better tweets in searches is (very) good, they’re so wrong on making it. Number of followers on Twitter only shows us the popularity, not authority. Everyone is cheating this number and what is the meaning when their tweets don’t make sense at all for most of their followers?

Scoble also criticised the idea with two posts. He thinks that Mike and Loic “smell” money from idiocy and estimating authority based on number of followers is a clear proof. Thanks Scoble so much, I can’t agree more with what he said in the 2nd post of his serie:

See, this is why I really don’t care about Mike Arrington’s claim that I should blog more because my traffic is going down. If I cared only about building a business or making money then he’d definitely be right.

Yeah, more and more you care about traffic, making money, blah blah… less and less authority, quality you get. You will don’t have enough time for something really valuable.

PS: I was too busy and kept this port as a draft so long…is it too late to publish this post?

Google Friend Connect launched with Twitter today. It’s really a hot news for Google fanboys (me? I am a Google fanboy, but not a crazy one) that Google with Twitter as an ally is winning in the war with Facebook. But definitely it’s not something like Facebook vs Twitter + Google as Anh Hung said in his article. Actually Twitter didn’t choose Google, Google just picked up Twitter API, implemented and wrote an article about it. Yeah, and Twitter quickly responded about this that they’re working on Facebook Connect as well as MySpace Data Availability that will require more development effort on their part.

So what does these whole things mean?

• For Google, this’s a big improvement. Most of people use Gmail IDs to sign-in and join sites integrated Google Friend Connect and that only makes a members list for the sites, no more. For me, it’s so classical. Members list, shoutbox widget,… just like 10 years ago when people were excited with Dynamic Web. With Twitter integration, Google Friend Connect is more social a bit. The friends in the list are your actual friends – or, at least people you’ve got an online relationship with.
• For users, it just means now you can use your Twitter account to sign-in and join sites integrated Google Friend Connect. Furthermore you can know whether your Twitter friends join the sites or not. Personally it is not really meaning to me.
• For Facebook, why so serious?

Yep, for a conclusion, I still choose Facebook Connect for my blog.

I have used Twitter for 6 months, not a long time, although I had heard a lot about it as a representation of micro-blogging for years. But recently I have been really addicted to Twitter especially after Mumbai attacks.

People talked about how fast Twitter broadcast info about the bridge collapsed last year or the earthquake in China this year. But only when the Mumbai attacks happened few weeks ago, I did have a chance to witness the miracle Twitter can do. I followed the news stream updated every second about the attacks as many others all around the world on Twitter. Right after I had found out that Twitter was the best news source at that time to catch latest information in Mumbai, I set up a breaking news page based on Monitter that can display live searching results of some specific keywords from Twitter. For 36 hours, the page reached about 6000 people. I agree with Bernard Lunn on RWW. Twitter’s live search is really good in some cases especially live events like this one.

Nearly at the same time with Bernard, Nick Bilton wrote on O’Reilly Radar about the Twitter Gold mine. He belives that semantic ads would be the key in its incredible business model. But as far as I know, the road ahead will be very long with semantic web. It’s not simple like you tweet: “I want a new car” and you will get recommendations based on what you have tweeeted before. I think recommendation is good but it should be based on need of receivers, not senders. Don’t put useless recommendations everywhere, it would be the same as spam and Twitter will be an ads machine.

It’s not too hard to see value of Twitter and many people have been talking about Twitter monetization. My question is: “where will the money come from?”. Some talked about modifying Twitter platform to something else that can make money but I believe that making money from something built on top of Twitter (or value of Twitter: Real time demonstration, fast propagation, social graph, user experiences,…) is the way. I mean money won’t come from inside Twitter like Display ads, Tweet ads, Search ads,…bla bla (or come but little) but outside and based on the value of Twitter. I know, it’s vague, but I believe, at least now.

The post was written last week and saved as a draft. A week passed and still have no more idea about this so … I just publish the post and keep thinking.

People are talking about Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and OpenID ebulliently. This urges me to read more about digital identity and online identity. Yes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But I wonder what the future of online identity is when people are making open standards for user-centric digital identity everywhere.

I have seen carefully identity 2.0 keynote of Dick – CEO of Sxip Identity although I had known before that Erick from Techcrunch threw .... to Dick’s face. But not everything around Dick is ..... I agree with him in some points. Identity is not only about name, photo, birthday,… it’s also about what you say, what you do, what others say about you,… But actually I have no idea about Identity 2.0. Well, recently people put 2.0 after everything they claim that it’s making a revolution, or at least as what I see in Vietnam. What Tedd Dziuba said is true in a sense:

A revolution doesn’t mean that you pseudo-sexually “poke” someone from Facebook to MySpace. It doesn’t mean that you can type in your password once and have access to every authenticated service out there. It certainly doesn’t mean that you can make a word processor program work when you’re not connected to the internet (we’ve had that feature for decades). No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded.

More about stories around “identity”, Kaliya at IdentityWoman.com linked to my previous post and said that she feels strange when people like Facebook Connect because of “real identity”. I think I will have to explain more detail about this point.

What do you need to identify someone in a (online) community?

I have different identities in different (online) communities even somewhere I use the same account names. Each identity is “real” in the community it belongs to, only that not every relates to my real life (or at least my life people around me usually see in reality). Yeah, your avatar, your status, your account name, your articles, your conversations,…that’s enough for me to identify who you are in the community and it’s “real” in sphere of the community.

You choose what to show up in real life.

In my opinion, one of characteristics to distinguish Facebook from other Social Network sites is “real identity”. “Real” here means your identity in Facebook has connection to your real life. Come back to Facebook Connect, you don’t have to connect every sites, every communities to Facebook. It’s your choice. You choose which site you want to display your activities there in Facebook. In other words, that means you choose what you want to show in real life. Facebook also lets you set privacy settings to make sure right people see right activities you want they see.

For example, you can make a video of you having sex, upload to porntube or whatever, submit to reddit with the title “The most f*cking amazing sex scene” and broadcast on Twitter that “I have never seen anything amazing like this video…” with different identities. And what do people think when looking at this in each community? Just a sex tape leaked and someone uploaded it, another found that it’s amazing and wanted to share to everybody, that’s all. If you want to show these whole things as yours in reality, connect it to Facebook somehow.

In my case, I am blogging with my real identity so that integrating Facebook Connect into my blog is worth as what I said in my previous article.

PS: I did have to remove the Facebook Connect plugin for Wordpress because it’s still buggy. Hope it will be more stable soon in next version.