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Character Encoding Again, here I go ranting about what sucks with this site... You know, for a site that caters to people of different Asian nations, it sure does lack in basic things such as displaying non-ASCII characters correctly. Nowadays, you have to be pretty clueless to manage to screw this up when such encodings as UTF-8 and UTF-16 (both are flavors of Unicode) are out there to make everything work for everybody. Why isn't everything in UTF-8 on this site? Failing that, why isn't the encoding (GB, Big5, JShift, etc.) specified for the pages? And I still can't read the messages I received over two weeks ago because I'm a non-premium members. I wanted to subscribe to make new friends before my next trip to Asia, but I'm not sure I want anymore since the people I will send messages to will maybe never get my messages! |
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5/24/2010 2:26 pm |
@Erica: the people who bought over the site would get a much higher return on investment by putting just the little effort needed to put this site from the technical abyss in which it currently sits. Hell, I'm not even specializing in Web development, but I see so many things they could improve that would make this site better and rake in much more money for its owners... @Ann: that's a very good question. Looking at how much this site sucks, I'm actually tempted to start one to do competition with it. The only thing this site has going for it is a large base of subscribers due to historical reasons. Imagine putting a site out there that's actually good. It could make a killing with the right marketing and strategy. I'll have to do a bit of impromptu market research to see what other competitors are already out there. Then, if a site with a decent user base already exists, I'll just switch over to it. If not, I should seriously consider filling that gap in the market!
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Funny, you keep ranting but still spending your time in this sucks site... the more you find that this is sucks,then you should be more determined to start a new one. Well congrats! hahaha But for most of us here, we found good friends in here online and offline. Well Goodluck, I hope you can start a site that is not sucks as AFF You laugh at me bec i am different, i laugh at you because you're all the same
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5/25/2010 6:20 pm |
The first part of eliminating a problem is recognizing there is a problem. The second part is devising ways to solve the problem. The final part is putting the plan into action. If you want things to change, you have to notice what's wrong and make others know it too in the case of social media. A good company would have market research staff probing its customer base and potential customers for desired functionalities. I think it's safe to assume whoever is doing that here wasn't the smartest kid in the class. It that case, discontent must be brought up to the enterprise rather than having it realize by itself. As for potential solutions, I think this I've provided a few (UTF-8 versus regional page encoding, predictable access to messages, pricing in function of member demographics and location, streamlining of user interface, maximization of average session time by working with the customers rather then against them...). What I lack, of course, is any authority in the matter on this site. Implementing a new one takes more time then fixing an existing one. Before I embark on such an endeavor with partners who have built similar sites in Canada, I need to gauge what my likely costs in terms of time and money would be and what sorts of benefits I could expect to get in addition to solving the issue of attraction a substantial new base of users. The latter problem could be solved by partnering up with a celebrity. It's actually an interesting challenge and could make a great case study throughout an MBA. 
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6/2/2010 1:00 am |
sometimes it sucks but we also can get good friends here even with lots lots of new rule, hehe. try erica's idea, use ...at dot com... to keep contact with your firends. as for the message reading, it works only if u make sure u use English to communicate with each other. anyway, goodluck to all of us!!
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