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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"?
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.
"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.
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.
Or what Zerox did day before yesterday ;) ;)
Striving to be common...
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.
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.
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
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"
Oh yeah, I'll just tell my grandma and my 14 year old niece to code their own and host it on a linux box running slackware. That'll be a sure fire way of getting the idea adopted by the main stream. Jesus, do people like you ever stop to consider that 99.9% of the people on the net don't give a rats ass about the fucking source code and whether they have access to it?
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.
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.
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.
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