Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Try Out Blog Service In Japan
theodp writes "Signaling its growing awareness of blogging as both a potential threat and a new business opportunity, Microsoft is turning to Japan to launch its first blog service and aims to have 1 million users in the first year. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's offering targets mobile bloggers, since nearly 90 percent of Japan's cell phones have Internet capability."
Just look at what Google is doing today.
Does anyone think they're going to have much luck with a program like this in a market that is as flooded as the blog market? There are so many options for blog creation out right now i have a feeling microsoft will be getting a run for it's "money" or worse with a step like this. I can't help but expect failure.
...Brog Service in Japan.
I actually quite like it... Slashdot is just pissed off because it used to be a News Site and now everyone is calling it a Blog :-)
Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it's blogging. Tomorrow it'll be a search engine. Next week it'll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.
(I get the feeling that the most popular screen colour for these Japanese blogs will be blue, for some reason.)
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
I predicted before this would become a new trend. American companies will start launching "high-tech" startups in companies like Japan first, to see how they are received, before trying them on the American market. The general public seems to be more receptive to technology in some European and Asian markets, as evidenced by their wide use of wireless and mobile technologies.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the way we do business.
So on to the important question: will the Slashdot duplicate read "Microsoft will try out blog service in Japan... in Japan"?
M$ clearly considers Google a threat.Google acquired blogger and M$ ofcourse perceives blogging is the next best thing. GOOGLE'S CORE VALUE : "Dont Be Evil"
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Okay, I'll confess ignorance. I have two questions about this new Microsoft service.
1) How is a Blog Service any different from Slashdot journals?
2) Why would people pay money to Microsoft to post comments and short, misspelled paragraphs about their lives?
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
Just look at what Google is doing today.
;)
Or what Apple did yesterday.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
What do the problems at Orkut have to do with blogging?
"im on trn
hm soon
btw im nt wrkin wknd."
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Yes another bad idea from Microsoft. When is Microsoft going to issue a public apology for Windows ME? All jokes aside, it looks like Microsoft is trying to counter Google's blogger.com
I remember when blogging ment beating the shit out of someone. And buy reading the post I'm not sure it's not, I can see Microsoft, beating people over the internet. Or atleast letting random people in todo it through the window.
Say you want to type "watashi" (="I"), you first type "wa" and it is replaced by the hiragana character, then "ta", then "shi". And you end up with three hiragana chracters instead of roman alphabet characters.
It may very well be that corporate 'blogs' will be limited in their allowed communication scope - more like a 'look how fun and skilled we are' and 'menu for today' type of things.
With the rampant IP filings (software patents), any real information about a companies offerings could be reworded and patented, thereby forcing a legal battle, which small companies would lose financially (i.e. - 25% of budget to legal fees vs. product research/marketing).
Nop, ... in Japan ... in Japan
more like "they are 1 million people blogging... in Japan"
or
1 million people find blogs usefull
and last
MS finds business opportunity
Or what Zerox did day before yesterday ;) ;)
Striving to be common...
So everthing is entered in Romanji?
Wow, lets type in a foreign language.
Whats the problem?? Just use your mobile to connect to your blog-host edit the darn file, and .... SAVE!
HUH??
I didn't quite mean to say that Orkut was the only blogging site around....I should have added an "etc" to the end of that....I'm just referring to the fact that blogging is not as popular as it might have been before
My MythTV HowTo
Or what Microsoft is doing the day after yesterday.
They couldn't possibly make one worse than Orkut. Orkut is the slowest most worthless POS I have ever had the displeasure to use. Honestly. The Brazilian issue isn't even a big deal, or it wouldn't be if they provided ways of searching by region/language. As it is when you search for a community you get a list of 13,000 over half of which will be in portugese. You have no options for filtering it. Orkut is unusable during the day, it's literally that slow. It takes several minutes just to login. If google was smart they would drop the "affiliate" part and just cut it loose. The only thing I hate more than Orkut is probably LiveJournal.
If MS does this right I'll use it. It must be fast, foster a good community vibe and be user friendly. Oh yeah and all this "Must be invited to use our dog slow and shitty service" won't be tolerated either. MS is smart though, I doubt they'll be so dumb as to make it invite only.
We don't need a post like this for every Slashdot story... we don't have to go there to know it's just going to be a 503 message ;)
Do you think Bill Gates will buy an "I'm blogging this?" T-shirt?
He's completely wrong. Every japanese cell phone I've used has each column of the chart on a button..
..
so if you have the chart like
a ka sa ta
i ki shi chi
u ku su tsu
e ke se te
o ko so to
then '2' would be a, press again for i, again for u.. depending on the manufacturer and model, you'd go through hiragana first, then hit katakana. Or, you'd switch modes to get to katakana/hiragana/alpha/numeric inputs.
For the kanji, there's either a special button and it'll interpret, or some phones have a little window at the bottom that has a list of commonly used words that start with what you've typed in so far. This was a really nifty feature on mine that I loved.. saved me a lot of typing for when I was emailing my japanese friends.
And yes, I said email: that's how text messaging works over there. There's in-network (c-mail, skymail, whatever..), but to get between J-Phone, DoCoMo, au, etc.. you use regullar smtp email, built in to the damned phone. Annoying when my parents didn't realize that I was reading their 10 page long emails on a cell screen, but oh well.
Yeah, Google certainly edged their way into this years-established trend weeks before Microsoft!
Or what Microsoft tried to do 10 years ago but realized they where a "software company" and got out of... Remember MSN? The next AOL? DIdn't fly then will not fly now. Build a decent OS and they will come. Sprinkle little flashy things all over it, and they will barf.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Aah when you blog in Japan-tonight...
Blog in Japan-be-tight...
Blog in Japan...ooh the eastern sea's so blue
Blog in Japan-alright
Pay! - Then I'll sleep by your side
Things are newsy when you blog in Japan
Oh when you blog in Japan...
I just hope there's not a Japanese equivalent of "I ate a sandwich today. It sucked. I hate my life and my parents because they make me do homework. Linkin Park is the only thing I relate to. " (grammar and spelling have been corrected)
www.google.com
Microsoft Will Try Out Blog Service ..... in Japan! :D
Most cellphone providers here have an SMS to SMTP gateway, but an SMTP client built into the phones? Geez.
I am laughing my ass off.
What is a "Brazilian issue"?
What does Orkut have to do with blogs?
The only complaint I have with Orkut is that their "forgot-my-password" thingie seems not to be working.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You'd like to see them, having survived anti-competitive behaviour remedies, slip a little bit out of the public eye but raise greater and greater revenues with behind-the-scenes monopolies (like CICS)?
Spike Lee will be introducing mobile blogging for the Afro-American community (in Japan). He is calling this new service "Mo Better Blogging".
What next, you ask? Is Spike Lee the only movie director to get involved in this development? The answer is no, friends. Spike Jonz will be introducing a service in Japan called "Blogging John Malkovich".
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
By including a link to their sites in each blog entry, M$ sites will finally have a high enough pageranking on Google!
I don't know why people would do blogging on other poeple's sites, I do mine over at my one site, That way I can change the code of the software if I want, (which I have a little bit, but 99.99999% of the code is still untouched bblog software)
I admit I pay others to host my site, I would like some day to bring the hosting off of another persons computers and get the bandwidth and server 100% under my control, but for now this is an acceptiable solution.
Well, since it's invitation only. . . how is anyone without an invite supposed to know? Orkut's about page makes NO mention of a blogging feature. It specifically states that it is "an online community website designed for friends" and a "social network".
Satoshi doesn't seem to be making blanket assumptions, but provisional ones that could be based on information available on the Orkut website. (You'll have to ask him where he got his information.)
Cool your jets, big boy. Nobody has been pissing in your cornflakes, at least not here.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Maybe I've got Xbox on the brain today, but I can't help but wonder if the MS Blog service in Japan will be used in part to promote the Xbox and Xbox games there. Not only that, I could see this being intergrated with XboxLive in Japan as well. With 90 percent of Japanese cell phones having internet access, they'd have a great way to reach a large audience.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
well, it might be handled on the network instead of at the phone, but it's transparent. my cell phone had an email address (spectral@myprovider), and I could send emails to anyone.. it just worked.
Attachments and everything, so I could send my phone an email with a vcard or a purevoice file and have it save them (to its data folder, address book, wherever) for later use. I never tried emailing myself a program, but i suspect that would have worked as well.
I think you mean Romaji (with Wikipedia goodness).
Common mistake -- even Wikipedia redirects a search on Romanji to Romaji automatically...
By the time a word does get into a dictionary, people will already be using it to mean many other different things.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
All your blog are belong to us?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Microsoft blogs YOU!
sorry..
This is incorrect. Japanese on the computer is typed using the standard QWERTY layout, phonetically. The 50 hiragana are there if you want to type it that way, but most people do not. Everybody learns QWERTY. It's the fastest and most efficient way.
Microsoft does run a site called "The Spoke," at http://www.thespoke.com. I'll admit that I don't know anyone who uses it (and it's badly broken in Firefox), but it's got Blogs and "Copyright Microsoft 2004" at the bottom. So it's not quite fair to say this is their first entry into the world of blogging.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. -AC
uh.. you already wrote it down as a word.. you going to find many expressions that aren't words?
you just read the wrong blogs, some development diaries & etc can have real gems in them. of course a blog about "nothing" is going to be quite boring.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
you just read the wrong blogs, some development diaries & etc can have real gems in them.
Can you link any of these? I must admit I'm with the "Why blog" crowd but I think it would be interesting to see a blog with decent content that would be worth the readers time.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
But why, when racism is so much more funny than accuracy... apparently...
Since when is making fun of a foreign language racism? "Oh look, we English-speaking people have sloppy, drawn out vowels!" Is that actually insulting to you?
On a related note, can't Political Correctness just fucking die already?
that's what I said. On the cell phone, it's done the way I said in the first email.. on the computer, most use the romaji input.
I then went off on a rather drastic tangent describing an imaginary alternate input system I just made up, but thought would be cool.
Sorry, where in "burogu sa-bisu" is there a phoneme ending in a vowel?
Sorry, I mean not ending in a vowel (i.e. ending in a consonant)
Dutch is funny as hell. I defy you to visit the Netherlands and keep a straight face when you see a gondola captain cussing out someone who just cut him off. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the culture--it's just an utterly foreign sound that your ears must get used to before you can get over the humor. I don't find Japanese funny at all anymore, simply because I've watched so much subbed anime...
Spanish is funny because it is (or seems to be, anyway) so much faster than English. Japanese is funny (I guess) because it's so gutteral. Swedish and Dutch are so funny because of the wildly fluctuating pitches. German (and to a lesser extent, Russian) is funny because it sounds so hard and militaristic. With the exception of this last one, NONE of these things has anything to do with the country itself and all of these reactions will disappear if one spends enough time around that language. Maybe this reactions are silly or even offensive, but they're not half as offensive as someone who calls them racist.
Didn't see it at all, in fact, as I was too busy screaming at Firefox for crashing every other second. Was replying to the parent, who said simply "Brog." In actuality, the L is probably the least severe problem with translating "Blog" into Japanese, and yours fits nicely.
SMS doesn't have attachment capability AFAIK, so it's most likely just straight-up SMTP. Not as useful in the States from what I've seen--people have more space to dedicate to a desktop machine. The Japanese have more stringent space requirements. (IANANetwork Engineer.)
So that's why anonymity is identified with cowardice on this site...
I found that while, yes, other people's blogs are mostly useless, it's really good for communication between friends (especially friends who don't use IM). Right now a buddy of mine set up a blog for our close friends and we use that to keep in touch as we slowly disperse across the world. Plus, it's got the ability for "hey, guys. Listen to this phone message I just got" or "Check this shit out." without having to sink to installing MSN (or any other IM for that matter). And later on, the link is still there, rather than having to dig through histories of chats and what-have-you.
But yeah, people's blogs in general....LAME.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
I can't help notice the completely random accusation that Microsoft thinks blogging is a "potential threat."
Barring the fact it's just another random Slashdot statement with no backing evidence, I guess Longhorn Blogs, Channel 9, and the massive MSDN blogs from actual Microsoft employees are threatening their own company.
In the past few years, Microsoft has become incredibly open as a company. I think Slashdot has greatly underreported that fact, and as a result, people here have a wrong impression about Microsoft's developers. Slashdotters should step outside of Slashdot once in a while for its tech news.
Uhh Google is a search engine. What does that have to do with blogs?
Google owns Blogger.
MS Usenet?! Oh god, the little clippy will notice i am reading a thread and ask to help...
Of course! The threat model! Everything Microsoft does is a strategic military move against the Resistance.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
One thing occurs to me about Microsoft blogging: Will people be able to criticise Microsoft, and/or endorse open source etc ?
I'm not sure if it apochraphal (?spelling) but didn't Microsoft write a clause into the Frontpage license that forbade licensees from using it to publish any material that was anti-Microsoft ?
I suppose the flipside of this is that if Microsoft implement filtering and censorship, then they may be able to create a 'clean' blogging area and appeal to a more family audience, much as AOL does.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Sorry, but how can a blog be a threat to anyone?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In English, we use our tongue against the top of our mouths to make the letter L, but we do not use our tongue to make the letter R. Most Japanese can handle L pretty easily after some guidance because the Japanese sounds also use the tongue on the top of the mouth, though in more of a rolling from back to front motion. Actually, the closest sound to the Japanese sounds I have found in other languages is the Spanish single R sound.
Anyway, making light of the Japanese (language) confusion of R and L has nothing to do with race or racism. If a pasty, white boy like myself had been raised from birth in Japan with little or no English training, I wouldn't be able to make the English R sound either.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I often find it annoying to type in English on my phone, which is probably why I don't really like mailing my non-Japanese friends from my phone. The difference is amazing. For example typing the following on my phone (the Japanese would be Japanese characters, but /. doesn't seem to like them):
Where are you now? : 18 characters (counting spaces), 41 button presses
ima doko? : 4 characters (in Japanese), 16 button presses
BTW, this was with my own typing style on a DoCoMo P251iS phone (YMMV). The Japanese can be even shorter as it remembers recently used kanji and words so sometimes you can really speed through it. English however is much slower, even if you shorten it.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
For those who don't get it, sometimes there is confusion between green and blue when speaking Japanese because many times they use the word aoi for both. For example:
ao-zora: blue sky
shingo ga aoi: greenlight (traffic signal)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This is almost right. The "a" is on the 1 key, not 2. The letters are arranged according to the Japanese alphabet
1 = a, i, u, e, o
2 = ka, ki, ku, ke, ko
3 = sa, shi, su, se, so
The star button is used to switch input modes, but most of the time it is unnecessary. ALL cell phones now come with a predict function which predicts what you are writing. To use an above poster's example, if I want to write "watashi" (I), I DO NOT write WA . TA . SHI . nor do I do any switching to kanji etc (as the above post said). Rather, I just hit 0 for wa (wa, wo, n ....) and the bottom of the screen has a list of suggestions. Since I use this word a lot it is the first choice, so I just hit DOWN > ENTER to get the kanji for watashi. It works this way for all kanji. Occassionally it will not have the kanji I want to use, but most of the time one of the first few predictions is that I want.
It also has a learning function. So it remembers words that I have used recently / more frequently and puts those near the top of the predict list. I recently went to a summer festival and mailed my date to tell her I might wear a JINBEI (summer festival clothes for men). The kanji for this was not one of the first predictions when I entered only JI. I had to enter the whole word to get the kanji. But in the next mail, when I wanted to use that word again, it did show up in the first screen of predictions after simply entering JI.
For me, as a foreigner, this is a great system. I speak Japanese far better than I can write. I don't have to have memorized all of the kanji to write on my cell phone, I just have to recognise them in context. The downside is that this makes me lazy in my kanji learning.
A lot of Japanese people say that they are "wordpro baka" (word processor fools) - since using a predict function is ubiquitous they only have to recognise kanji (reading skills) but their production abilities (writing skills) aren't as good. (Recognising and writing aren't the same thing when it comes to thousands of kanji.)
I think the article stated that something like 90% of Japanese cell phones are internet-ready. I think it is a bit misleading. ALL new phones have internet capabilities. It would only be older phones that do not. I have one single co-worker (out of a hundred) who does not have internet capability on his cell phone. That is only because he hasn't upgraded in a few years. The four main cell phones companies all have a system whereby you can upgrade to a new (expensive) phone for little money after a period of time. (Example - after one year of my contract I can get the new TV-equiped Vodafond for half price, after 2 years, for about 1/4 the price, after three years, for free. Or something like that.)
When I bought this phone (in March) I got the cheapest (hence oldest) model I could find. I think I paid about $25 dollars for it. It is MUCH smaller and has more features than the new phones at home in Canada that I would have to pay $500 for. I also pay less per month than I used to to Canada.
On a side note, I find it far easier to write mail in Japanese on my cell phone than in English because of the nature of the langauge. A couple years ago in Canada I used cell phone mail for a short time. I had to pay extra for it in Canada, whereas it is just a normal feature of a phone here. It seems tortuous to write in English and keep having to insert a space between words and keep having to hit the forward button to be able to write letters that are on the same button. It takes a long time to write a sentence. But in Japanese there are no spaces between words (makes text entry on a cell phone MUCH quicker and easier). As well the predict funtion means that you probably only have to enter 1/3 or maybe even 1/4 of the 'letters'. Finally, since the Japanese language usage
That's Romaji input for computer keyboards. Not cell phones.
Cell phones use the "1" button for typing "a, i, u, e, o", and "2" button for "ka ki ku ke ko" and so on. Transforming it to Kanji uses a rather sophisticated Kana-Kanji transform program, based on built-in dictionaries and past user inputs.
You'll have to see it to belieave it, but the typing speed of those Japanese Highschool kids are VERY FAST, using only their thumb.
Agreed on all points. i wrote the email while at work, looked at my japanese phone when I got home. two years ago it was $46 dollars from au (A3014S.. a sony ericsson phone), and it's better than any I've seen here in America..
:)
Damn I want to go back
Everything has to appear to be a threat. I guess it's true: Only the paranoid survive...
:)
And a quote on the same topic:
"Why you always wanna make it a fight?!"
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
1. Microsoft to launch blogging service... in Japan.
2. ???
3. Profit!
But heay, look on the bright side. At least Blogs aren't launching Microsoft service in former Soviet Russia.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Don't forget blogs.msdn.com where a lot of MS developers have blogs.