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China is next in my series on top international Web apps. If you haven't been following, the other countries I've profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia and Spain. As this series has gone on, the comments have become as important as the posts - perhaps moreso. I'm hoping this post about China's Web application market is no exception, because China is (obviously) a huge country and one blog post can't hope to cover it all. So I encourage people from China who may read this, or people who are familiar with the Chinese Web, to contribute your thoughts in the comments here - and add web apps to the list. 

I have to thank several people for the information in this post: In particular Tangos Chan, who runs the excellent China Web 2.0 Review blog, and Benjamin Joffe - CEO of Asian Internet consultancy Plus Eight Star Ltd and co-founder of Mobile Monday Beijing. Also thanks to Chang W. Kim, who introduced me to Tangos and Benjamin! Sam Flemming of Chinese research company CIC Data and Micah Sittig from Shanghai also contacted me with their thoughts.

Overview of China market

Let's start with an overview of Chinese web apps. Benjamin Joffe said "there is basically at least one Chinese equivalent for every single US web2.0 service that is more than 2 months old." Here are some other characteristics of the China web scene, suggested by Tangos Chan and with further comments from Benjamin...

Big companies still dominate the market

Tangos says that so far there are no outstanding small startups that have successfully gained the attention of ordinary internet users. For example, in the blog hosting market Blogcn, Bokee and Blogbus were among the first movers. But after big companies Sina, Sohu and Baidu entered the scene, they won market share quickly [see short profiles of these companies below]

Benjamin adds that no Chinese startup that stays a startup for long - "basically they grow to over 100 staff and get their first million $ round of financing fairly quickly, or disappear." 

Chinese startups often copy the Silicon Valley model

Tangos: "Sometimes, just a copycat even without any change."

At the Microsoft TechEd conference in Auckland on Monday, I got a chance to sit down with George Moore - GM for the Windows Live Developer Platform. He is of course based in Redmond, but was over in NZ for TechEd.

I started off by asking George about the "largest blogging service on the planet" quote from his presentation that morning, in reference to Live Spaces. Ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble had taken issue with it and the story ended up number 1 on Techmeme. George said it was a "tempest in a teapot" and that the more important point is the relative amount of growth of photos on Spaces - 5 million photos being added each day. I prodded a little to see if he knew Google's blogger.com numbers, but he didn't. In any case, if you want to see George's quote in full context at TechEd in Auckland, it's available on video.

Here is an edited transcript of the rest of the interview...

RICHARD: Talking about general stats, this morning you gave some very impressive numbers about Windows Live. They indicate that the Live platform has already gained a significant user base (much of it from previous MSN-branded services). A lot of the Live products are still in beta though (e.g. Mail, Shopping, live.com itself). So where would you say Windows Live is at currently in terms of product rollouts - will things start to come out of beta when Vista is launched, for example?

GEORGE: Well actually you're starting to see a number of the websites losing the beta designation and the trend looks alright. I can't say the specific date when everything's going to be out of beta, but certainly it's going to be this year - ahead of Vista.

RICHARD: Gadgets, or mini applications, are becoming increasingly important on the Web - they can be added to personalized start pages (like live.com), to social networks (MySpace is a popular platform for mini-apps), and even in normal blogs/webpages. You also showed one today that was integrated with Windows Live Mail...

GEORGE: The Live Mail example was to illustrate the gadget architecture. In fact Windows Live Mail is built on the same gadget architecture, as is Spaces. So the basic kernal pieces are identical and used and reused across the Windows Live services. The important point is not that we're asking developers to go out and build gadgets because we think it's a good idea. We're self-hosting them ourselves - actually building our own services out of that same architecture. We're dog-fooding those pieces and we're achieving fairly massive amounts of scale using the same architecture.

RICHARD: Perhaps the most exiting part about gadgets is when future technologies start hosting gadgets - Xbox, mobile phones, television/Media Center. Can you tell us a bit more about the larger, future, vision for gadgets for MS?

GEORGE: It really depends upon the capabilities of the browser. I mean obviously you're not going to run gadgets as they exist today with Ajax inside. In mobile alone that's going to lack a significant Javascript interpreter and the xhtml request pieces and all those components. So in many cases it's dependent more on the capabilities in the underlying browser. In the case of Windows Media Center, you're running IE at that point - so there's no reason why you couldn't run a gadget in that case anyway. It'd be a ten foot UI experience as opposed to a two foot experience. But architecturally there's nothing different because you're just running on top of IE.

RICHARD: So that's part of your vision, to have gadgets running on all sorts of devices - not just the PC...

GEORGE: Well certainly having the user have access to their content from any number of different devices, is certainly part of the vision. We've been talking about that for almost a year now. The technological means of how that data is rendered will be dependent on the underlying capabilities of the device and where the device is predominantly used - and ten foot vs two foot UIs in mobiles and intermittedly connected vs always connected... that sort of thing. And that goes hand in hand anyway with the Live Anywhere vision around the gaming - and all those pieces as well. 

RICHARD: Is a lot of that outside Microsoft's control - in that it needs other parts of the infrastructure to come together. For example with mobile phones, the platform isn't quite ready yet.

GEORGE: For traditional mobile phones, yes. I mean you have fairly anemic browsers in those mobile phones today, but for Windows Mobile phones increasingly you'll see more capabilities being added into the browser. But that's just the normal evolution of things, that devices get smarter, more transisters, making use of the transisters, that sort of thing. 

RICHARD: The Vista Sidebar is an interesting development. As Vista hasn't yet been released, most people probably don't fully understand how Windows Live and gadgets will interact with Vista and the sidebar. I wonder if you could walk us through the high level of how that Web/desktop integration will work once Vista is released? 

GEORGE: The gadget architecture can actually render to any number of different technologies. It can render to DHTML, to Avalon, etc. So it would be up to the gadget author to detect if they're running on a Vista machine, if they choose. They could just write a standard straight-up vanilla gadget that renders to dhtml - and it would work on live.com and Vista sidebar. However they could detect the fact it's running on Vista and say: I'm on a more capable machine, I want to do something fancy with Avalon, some translucent GUI effects or whatever it is - or I'd like to be smart about being intermittedly connected... so it's really up to the imagination of the gadget author as to how far they want to push the boundaries, of leveraging the underlying hardware on the platform.

RICHARD: So the sidebar is quite a key element of vista - it seems like it's being positioned as a crucial intermediary between the Web and the desktop. Is that correct?

GEORGE: Well it's a handy docking space for people to be able to have ready access to bite-sized bits of information. That's the whole vision around the gadgets anyway. 

RICHARD: What are the most innovative Windows Live products in your opinion currently? I know it's early days, but are there one or two products that you think point to the future and are really innovative in nature. E.g. you mentioned Messenger Bots this morning, which are like automated agents. That seems pretty innovative to me, but I wanted to get your pointers on other interesting Live products/apps worth keeping an eye on. 

GEORGE: Well certainly the increased capabilities of running gadgets in Spaces, as Spaces continues to evolve and grow in that sense. It's interesting to think about Messenger and being able to de-compose parts of the Messenger experience. So things like the chat window itself is logically separate from presence, which is logically separate from the contacts, and things like that. So I think you're starting to see a generalised trend that this componentization metaphor is essentially de-composition of things like Messenger into its component hostable parts. 

The first example of this is the Contacts gadget, where we're essentially taking out the contacts information on Messenger and enabling it to be hosted standalone on a site. So when you say innovative features, you really have to differentiate between the finished services that we provide - Mail, Messenger and Spaces - and what capabilities we can provide for APIs inside vs the infrastructure pieces. The underlying pieces around why the Contacts gadget, for example, runs independent of Messenger and doesn't require the Messenger client to be installed on the user's machine. 

We want to provide this a la carte, you choose whatever APIs you want and push together - that's just how Windows itself bootstrapped. Because we can never predict [what people want] in various geographies worldwide - given users tastes, demographics. And the inventiveness of developers worldwide is astounding. We can't predict this, we don't want to be in the business of writing every single application. You will see us writing [apps/services], just as in the case of Office (which is a very horizontally available, broad set of applications). We do the same thing for Messenger and Mail, but there's lots of opportunities to do all sorts of innovative things using the base infrastructure.

RICHARD: Darryl Burling (a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft NZ) mentioned today at TechEd about being able to create "your own gadget-enabled website" using Atlas - which will enables developers to create rich interactive web pages. Can you explain a bit more about this? What kind of websites do you envisage people making?

GEORGE: If you go to atlas.asp.net, you can download the Atlas SDK. It works if your site is hosting ASP.Net, and there's a PHP version as well, and you just basically install this on your site and then users who visit your site essentially download the necessary client-side components - in order to do effective rendering of whatever you scripted/wrote.

So there's technically and legally - technically the bits are on atlas.asp.net for you to download. Legally there is a Go Live license that lets you  legally start to build businesses upon that if you so choose. Even ahead of a formal release, at which time it will become a supported Microsoft product.

RICHARD: Finally, is the Windows Live rollout closely aligned to the Vista rollout?

GEORGE: Logically they're disconnected. If you followed the re-org mails from a couple of months ago, there is alignment now in the management team. Steve Sinofsky's group is responsible for both the Windows Vista user experience piece as well as the Windows Live user experience piece - so there's unification from the organisational perspective, but not from a scheduling perspective.

Summary

To conclude the interview, George said they are very interested in feedback regarding things like the Contacts gadget - they routinely read the forums and blogs for feedback. He also noted that they can't predict every scenario that matters to people - so if you have ideas or specific scenarios for the Windows Live platform, you should contact the Windows Live team and let them know.

Photo: mobileme

I can't resist posting an excerpt from the Tim Berners-Lee podcast with IBM. This should hopefully put the matter of 'what is web 2.0' to rest, permanantly:

LANINGHAM: "You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?"

BERNERS-LEE: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

For good measure, Sir Tim adds:

"And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SCG and so on, it's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact."

Google's just announced a potentially significant update to its Google Base product, by releasing a data API for it. This essentially means Google is opening up Google Base, their database of structured content and home for many different verticals currently (jobs, vehicles, classified). The official blog post states:

"We're excited to announce the availability of the Google Base data API, which lets you write applications that dynamically interact with Google Base. You can insert, edit, or delete items programmatically, complementing existing input means like the Google Base front-end or the bulk upload mechanism. You can also query other users' published content and access their items via the API. This enables you to create domain-specific search applications (or mash-ups) combining Google Base content with other services."

Via Michael Fagan

I just published an excellent overview of Web APIs by Alex Iskold and he said that the new Google Base API competes with Amazon S3 - but is more powerful.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.

The Web computing platform today encompasses a wide range of functions, a lot of which are accessible via APIs (Application Programming Interface). From the relatively simple bookmarking service del.icio.us, to more complex functionality like Amazon S3's complete virtualization of data storage - it's amazing what can be done nowadays using Web APIs. 

In this post, I've categorized the Web platform into 6 infrastructure building blocks and I will briefly outline some of the products that define each one. The common thread is that each product mentioned has an API, which means it can be integrated as a part of other services.

Storage Services

The storage services focus on abstracting and virtualizing memory. The leader in this space is Amazon S3, which I discussed in depth in my article in Web 2.0 journal. For developers, S3 offers a minimalistic API that resembles a basic hashtable - allowing you to easily store and retrieve information. 

Another interesting service is openemy, which provides a File System-like API, but adds the ability to tag files. Earlier this year TechCrunch profiled other online storage services. But really we haven't yet seen the most disruptive storage services - GDrive from Google and LiveDrive from Microsoft are rumored to be in the works. And both will likely have APIs.

IBM has a podcast with Tim Berners-Lee. In a conversation with Scott Laningham of IBM developerWorks, Sir Tim discusses his early history with the Web, opportunities and challenges of the present, emerging technologies, and of course the semantic web.

Reading news on your mobile device - Another Web inventor, Dave Winer of RSS fame, is now busy creating mobile versions of popular news sources and weblogs for reading on your BlackBerry, Treo, or web-enabled cell phone. Included in the first batch is a mobile version of Read/WriteWeb! Also available is mobile NY Times. When I hear Dave saying something like this, I always prick up my ears:

"I've not been so excited or so sure about a new direction for mobile technology since podcasting in June 2004. I'm sure we'll look back on this as a turning point for mobile news."

And speaking of the future of the Web... Read/WriteWeb is giving away two seats to The Future of Web Apps conference - courtesy of Carson Workshops. For a chance to win, answer this question: What is the name of the person speaking about Google Calendar at The Future of Web Apps?

Email readwriteweb [at] carsonworkshops [dot] com with your answer and the folks at Carson Workshops will choose the first two people with the right answer.

Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be released at the end of this month. According to E-consultancy.com, it's the latest creation of ex-Google France chief Franck Poisson - who says it "will move out of beta on August 28" and be officially announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com:

"According to Poisson, Webwag will shortly launch a toolbar, allowing users to import bookmarks and other sites into widgets on their home page, as well as to search their chosen sites or the web as a whole. For the latter, it has inked a partnership with a “big search company”, which Poisson won’t name."

What's more, Poisson is talking up the chances of the independent start pages - such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and now Webwag. He thinks the big companies - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - won't capture more than 50% of the market:

"According to Poisson, Webwag’s revenue streams will include affiliate marketing – something Netvibes is doing via Kelkoo - and B2B deals, an as yet unexplored area. Chris previously suggested that white labelling this technology is one key revenue opportunity for these firms to consider.

Poisson said: "As Web 2.0 develops over the next three three to five years, two things will remain. Firstly, everyone will have their own blog, and over 75% of people will have their own personalised start pages.

"My belief is the big search portals (My Yahoo etc) will get 50% of that market, and 50% will be taken by three to four independents.”"

Personally I think that 50% figure for independents is too ambitious. I also question his claim that 75% of people will have a start page in 3-5 years, unless you count the likes of Yahoo.com as a 'personalized start page' (actually I suspect the distinction will be moot in 5 years time).

In any case I do believe there is very viable market for the 'independents' - particularly in white labelling and B2B deals. Personalized start pages are one of the more inventive areas of Web technology at the moment, with action aplenty from Internet giants and small startups alike. It'll be interesting to see what Webwag has to offer - currently the link above is password-protected.

68% of New Zealand's Internet traffic is to online auction site TradeMe, CEO Sam Morgan and Development Manager Rowan Simpson told me when I visited their Wellington office last Thursday. TradeMe is New Zealand's version of eBay, even down to the color scheme. But it's more than just an auction site now - over the past 7 years it has expanded into major verticals like jobs and motoring. Also it's probably NZ's biggest social networking platform (even though it's not strictly speaking an SNS).

Even considering all that, when TradeMe sold for a cool $700 Million dollars earlier this year - to Australian media company Fairfax - the price tag astounded many people in NZ and Australia. That's NZ dollars, but at the time it amounted to nearly $500 Million US dollars. To put that into perspective, it was a deal worth approximately 15 times more than the much more hyped sale of Flickr to Yahoo the year before.

But TradeMe only operates in New Zealand, a tiny country of about 4 Million people - so how on earth did it command such a high price?

In this exclusive interview with TradeMe CEO Sam Morgan ($220 Million richer after the sale to Fairfax) and Development Manager Rowan Simpson, we discuss how TradeMe became so dominant in the NZ market and how localization is a big part of their success.

The interview is edited for length. We started by talking about what makes TradeMe so successful...

Sam: "I guess the thing that is sort of unique about TradeMe and the New Zealand market really, is the fact that you can have one brand that can diversify so much. Even a market the size of Australia, you see one guy leading the property segment, one guy leading the motor segment, etc. Whereas in NZ, the population is ready for e-commerce and the good things about the Web - but unfortunately there aren't a lot of things that create standalone business models to generate enough revenue to be successful in a market this small. So the way it's kind of panned out in NZ has been much more about us expanding continually until we find the edges of what we're possibly able to do. We've basically just grown and expanded horizontally into new areas. Launched a website, people joined, they told their mates, keep growing and growing and growing. We've always been awed by the growth and running to keep up. And we're still growing and running to keep up. We're doing nearly a billion page views per month. For New Zealand, that's 60% of all of the ones served out of NZ - so it's a lot."

Rowan: "68% actually."

Sam: "That's of all the ones tracked by Nielsen, so it's not everyone everyone. But definitely all the big sites and most of the ones with any business model.

So we're now at a point where some of the things we're trying to do really well are to make sure the site is easy to use and ensure our engineering side (running of the servers) is tip-top as well. And that's a major, major piece of work - to run that sort of traffic, at an auction site especially where you've got competing bids and all those other kind of dynamics you need to deal with."

Richard: Recently you got sold to Fairfax. The sale price amazed a lot of people and even in comparison to some of the deals in Silicon Valley, it was a pretty big deal. So how did that deal come about in a small market like NZ with only 4 million people?

Today George Moore, GM of Windows Live, announced the Windows Live Contacts Gadget beta at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference, in Auckland New Zealand (I'm here at the conference courtesy of Microsoft NZ). Live Contacts provides programmatic access to a user's contact list, providing secure access to 400+ M active users with 12B contact records. The user is in full control over their personal data, George said.

Here's the official word:

"Learn how, with nothing more than a little JavaScript, you can allow customers to use their Windows Live Contacts (Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and Messenger contacts) directly from your Web site."

For more, check out the developer info and two working samples. MS developer Danny Thorpe notes:

"The contacts gadget is client-side JavaScript that enables end users to use their Windows Live contacts (from Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and Messenger) with third party (non-Microsoft) web sites, conveniently and securely.  The gadget works with any web server, most browsers, and doesn't require reams of license or partnership paperwork with Microsoft.  You don't have to assimilate your web server into the Microsoft collective in order to play with Windows Live contact data."

You can also show your contacts on a map using MS Virtual Earth, as per below:

Windows Live Stats

George Moore also told the conference attendees some stats of the current MS active audience - 240M Hotmail users, 230M Messenger, 72M Spaces, 8M mobile subscribers. He tells the mostly developer crowd at TechEd that "this is the audience that can be reached by Windows Live services." He goes on to say that at any one moment, 20M people are simultaneously connected on Messenger and 5.7 Billion messages are sent per day. Also there are 300M F2F video conversations on Messenger every month. George said Spaces is "now the largest blogging service on the planet" (RM: so it's bigger than blogger.com?) - it grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months.

This week I interviewed Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, to address the issue of Web standards compliance and IE7. There has been controversy about this lately, sparked by a Slashdot thread last week that claimed IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. I then repeated those claims on my ZDNet blog, but I have to admit that I (and Slashdot too) missed one vital point - it was largely based on an article Paul Thurrott wrote in August 2005, so it was outdated information. Chris Wilson was naturally sensitive to all the criticism and so he vigorously defended IE's standards compliance in his blog.

I hope my interview with Chris Wilson went some way to clarify Microsoft's current position on CSS and standards support for IE7. Although I personally still prefer Firefox's features - and the innovation and vision of browsers like Flock (one of my new sponsors btw) - I do think it's important not to unfairly tar IE7 with the same brush as IE6. Let's be frank, IE6 deserved to be tarred and feathered! Indeed Chris acknowledged that there were a ton of bugs in IE6 that caused web developers a lot of pain. But there seems to be a real conviction in the IE team to make IE7 as standards compliant as possible - while also trying to keep it backwards compatible with IE6 and their prior versions. That alone is a huge challenge.

Slashdot posted my interview with Chris, with an unfortunate title that was totally my fault: Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Compliant. I blame that heading on a tired mind, as it was late into the night my time. Sorry Chris and also to Slashdot's Taco, who was unfairly blamed for the heading. In any case, what Chris Wilson did say is that Microsoft is definitely improving its CSS and web standards support in IE7. He also wrote in a follow-up post on his blog that "in fact, I would insist that neither IE nor any other browser today is "compliant" with the CSS 2.1 standard. [...] I'd hope that every change we did in IE7 brought us closer to full compliance."

Paul Thurrott, one of the most influential Microsoft commentators in the world today, also has weighed in with his opinion. He thinks IE7 has its issues - what he calls "interface gaffs", along with features that Firefox has that he can't live without (such as inline search). But in terms of standards compliance Thurrott says IE7 is an improvement. He concludes:

"So will I be using IE 7? No, probably not: Firefox still "feels" better and it has features that are missing in IE 7. But I can't condemn IE anymore. Clearly, Microsoft cares about IE and is now updating it regularly. Clearly, they are listening to feedback, and this article is presented in that context, as feedback, as the start of a dialog. IE 7 isn't perfect, but it's not the monster IE used to be. I won't make fun of people for using it, and I won't feel stressed that it's going to compromise my system. And maybe, just maybe, I'll find myself back in IE again someday. You just never know."

I find myself in a similar position to Paul, although I am nowhere near as knowledgeable as him on these matters. My sense is that the IE team is working very hard to address the gremlins of the past - and in particular the standards monstrosity that was IE6. There is also still a lot of bad blood in the Web community about Microsoft's actions in the browser market in the past - I'm talking about the 90's here. But to be fair, they are reaching out to developers and others now, to make sure that IE7 is based on common Web standards rather than proprietary functionality. Of course it remains to be seen whether the final IE7 product will live up to the expectations, but for now they're making the right noises.

Personally I'm most interested in browser innovation - and that is where the likes of Flock and Opera are impressing. My interview with Flock's Geoffrey Arone covered that topic. I also discussed the future of browsers with Chris, which I will post about soon.