In this year’s For the coming UnConference 2009 organized by E27 team in the Biopolis, I will be doing a breakout session entitled “Much Ado about Social Networks in Asia” about online social networks in Asia. I will discuss the trends and observations emerging that I have seen from my experience in building an online private social network (SENATUS), investing in social networks (iHipo, Eteract) under Thymos Capital LLP and observing dominant home-grown social networks in Asia (CyWorld – Korea, Mixi – Japan and Xiaonei – China). This talk will assemble some of the material that I am currently for a sample chapter for a book that I am working on with two other authors. As a primer, I decide to present the slides on a talk which I have recently given in Barcamp KL 2009 entitled “The Importance of Being Social” (which was featured on Slideshare as the Presentation of the Day) where I presented a framework to understand social networks and a whacky idea to how a next generation Linkedin (based on a weighted social network idea) might look like. In this earlier talk, I discuss (i) the context of online social networks – why some have succeeded and some have failed and used CyWorld as an example of one which succeeded in Korea and failed in Germany and US, (ii) the technology of online social networks – why different features make an online social network platform different in its earlier days since SixDegrees.com (the first online social network), and (iii) the business behind online social networks – why some Asian based social networks particularly in East Asia are trouncing their American counterparts. If you think that I am going to replicate this talk for Unconference 2009, let me tell you that the talk I will be giving will be slightly different in what I have presented.
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