One Year On with Chua U-Zyn, Ping.SG
July 16, 2007 by Bernard Leong
Filed under Entrepreneurs
Recently, Ping.SG celebrated their first year anniversary. A year ago, we interviewed Chua U-Zyn, the founder of the project. Now a year later, he shares with us his reflections about how Ping.SG has evolved and where it will be heading. He will talk about some of the new features of the site.
BL: Congratulations on Ping.SG first year anniversary, how much has Ping.SG evolved since our last discussion when you first started? Do you think that it has achieved the success you have thought of at first?
Chua U-Zyn: Thanks, Bernard. Ping.sg certainly has changed a lot for the past one year. During your last interview, Ping.sg was still in the early v0.1 beta stage, merely a few days after the launch of the site. During the early beta stages, Ping.sg was still very rough. If you remember, users had to manually enter their blog entries in order to submit to the system; now, Ping.sg goes to the users blogs to grab the entries, parse them and post them automatically. When we hit version 1, we also had a facelift. That’s makes the current look and feel of Ping.sg so much different from the screenshots that you took while Ping.sg was featured on SGE a year ago. On top of the site changes, one of the most important factor that proves that Ping.sg has evolved from what it was a year ago is its community. The users of Ping.sg are not merely simply using the service of Ping.sg, some of them are also actively involved in the site community. A lot of us have become not just online friends whose blogs we visit frequently, but real life friends as well. Keep your browser at Ping.sg’s homepage for about 10 minutes, keep your eyes at the shoutbox, and you’ll know what I mean.
To me, the popularity and the growth rate of Ping.sg shows that the site has been very well-received among the local bloggers. That, on its own, can be considered an early stage success. As the site is still considerably very young, there are still a lot of things I, as the founder and the developer, and the current community of Ping.sg can do to bring Ping.sg to a new height.
Chua U-Zyn: Even though all of the sites that are mentioned are services for blogs, I do not think we are competing against any of them and I believe neither of them feels the same regarding Ping.sg as well. All of the sites above serve different purposes and all of them exist for their own reasons.
BL: One interesting feature of Ping.SG is that it has created a community of users, as compare to the other blog aggregators. How did that come about to the present state?
Chua U-Zyn: The community of Ping.sg is one of the most unique and distinguishing feature of Ping.sg as compared to the other blog aggregators. I believe that one of the driving factor that created the current state of community is the live shoutbox that are always visible and updating live on our site. Previously bloggers could create their sub-communities built around their respective blogrolls and by leaving comments on each others’ blogs, there has never before been a chance for bloggers of all walks to have a common site for them to interact with each other.
To say that the community is formed on its own solely because of the live shoutbox is certainly not true, the current state of Ping.sg community is built mainly from word of mouth from existing users. Upon discovering the fun factor and the benefits of Ping.sg, a lot of users are spreading Ping.sg to their blogger friends, thus getting their own respective sub-communities together to form the huge big Ping.sg community as we see today.
BL: Now you are moving to the 2nd year, what are the future directions of Ping.SG from here?
Chua U-Zyn: As a developer of the site, I will still continue to develop more features to improve Ping.sg and to bring more values to the users. On top of improving the site and trying to widen the userbase, 2nd year is also the time when I would need to look for a sustainable revenue model for Ping.sg.
Over the past few days, after the successful Ping.sg party, there has been a huge increase of registered users and traffic, causing the server load to overshoot, resulting in some down time. I have since upgraded the server specs a little but I doubt that it would last for long with Ping.sg’s current growth rate. Thus it is the time when I would have look out for a sustainable revenue model.
On top of that, there have been also a lot of questions asked regarding the expansion of Ping.sg to other countries or even to create a global blog aggregator that is similar to Ping.sg but does not restrict its users to only a certain region. I might want to look into that direction as well, to help build the communities of bloggers in various other regions or in the world. If any of you would like to partner with me or know someone who are interested in this, please do not hesitate to contact me at my email.
BL: Let’s come back to you, since being the man behind Today RSS and Ping.SG, have you started any new projects? If you do, what are these new projects about?
Chua U-Zyn: I haven’t started any new personal projects after Ping.sg as I was busy with my final year studies in NUS for the last year and also to grow and maintain Ping.sg during my free time, on top of doing freelance web development work for clients. Now that I have graduated about 2 months ago, I am probably going to start a new project soon. Generally, the new project would be about narrowing the gap between web applications and mobile applications, ideally allowing non-programmers to create web and mobile applications easily via an easy-to-use user interface.
BL: If you are now to advise younger programmers like yourself, what will be the programming languages that you will advocate them to learn in order to face the current challenges of the IT world?
Chua U-Zyn: To me, whatever language learned is not an issue. Personally I believe that a good programmer does not need to know a lot of programming languages, or even the latest or relevant ones. An analytical mind and a good problem solving skills are more important to a programmer than picking up yet another latest new programming language.
On top of that, a good programmer should also be fully interested and enthusiastic enough about what he/she is doing. If he/she’s dealing with web application programming, it would be advantageous to keep abreast of the latest technology and trends in the web applications world. It is also the same for embedded systems programmers, etc.
BL: What are the current trends in the internet and do you see any interesting opportunities that Singaporean IT entrepreneurs should seize on?
Chua U-Zyn: I think that the acceptance rate of internet applications has been stronger than ever before. A lot of users, even the previously non-IT savvy persons are more willing to use and rely upon internet applications today. If there are any good internet applications that you would like to create or any internet-related ideas that you have, there has never been a good time for you to start pursuing it than now.
BL: Can you tell us more about the features for the new version of Ping.SG after the first anniversary party?
Chua U-Zyn: Originally I had planned to launch v1.5 for Ping.sg anniversary party. But sadly I had not been able to complete a few of the main features that I wanted to release for v1.5, especially the one that would reduce the problem of pong spamming.
Nonetheless, I still released some of the updates that I have managed to complete before the first anniversary party quietly. Some of the new features:
- 1. Displaying of the date when an entry is pinged:
- - This would help answer some of the questions by user on why certain good pings only get so few pongs. This could due to the late pinging of the entry.
- 2. Listing of new users.
- 3. Personal Ping.sg filter:
- - If you are logged in to Ping.sg, you may see 2 buttons underneath each pings. One is labelled as ‘I love this blog’ and one is labelled as ‘I hate this blog’.
- - By clicking on these buttons, you would be helping yourself to create a more personalized Ping.sg.
- - When a blog has been marked as the one that you love, the entries from the blog, either past or future entries, would be highlighted among the list of other pings so that you will not miss out the latest updates from your favourite blogs.
- - When a blog has been marked as the one that you hate, the entries from the blog, eiter past or future entries, will be hidden from your view.
- - Note that this function is only applicable to personal level. The preferences saved are not shared among the community and will not affect other users’ experience on Ping.sg.
BL: Once again, thanks for the interview, and we hope to hear from you again in the coming year.
Acknowledgment: Photo of U-Zyn from Keropokman.
Related Links
1. An Interview with Chua U-Zyn, the innovator behind Ping.Sg and TodayRSS, SG Entrepreneurs
2. Photos: Ping.sg 1st Anniversary Party (plus blog awards) by Kevin Lim.
Related posts:
Loading ...
Comments