Hello world!
| December 7, 2010 | Posted by Dax under Articles |
After 10 years of hibernation, daxchow.com is finally live online. Since I registered this domain 10 years ago, I have never thought of putting up a personal website as I had been busy with my other commercially-driven websites. Now that the other assets have been retired, I decided to put up some writings of my own to spur discussions and interactions with friends, colleagues, clients and those-I’ve-yet-to-be acquainted.
The growth of social networks in the past 10 years has been tremendous, and I can possibly say that I was there before the beginning – before Friendster, Myspace, Facebook. Those were times of web-forums and discussion boards, which are still popular now but pale in comparison to the social networking sites. The sites that I developed were “communties-of-practice” forums that was more niche and brought together people of common interests to share knowledge – in this case, it was how to build, manage and grow websites. One other site I created was for people to create their personal websites for free. I was able to reach 11,000 members in a thriving community through Google Adwords advertising, word-of-mouth advertising, and article marketing. But this number is peanuts compared to what Facebook was able to achieve in a short time.
Now, I realize that these 2 concepts were possibly the very foundation of Facebook – a personal profile page where others can see what you are doing, what you have been saying, and who you are friends with, and a platform for that exchange to take place. Facebook pools together status updates from your friends and puts it together, leveraging on the network effect. Facebook gave those connections immediacy and a place for personal expression. It seems I was almost there – if only I had connected the dots and merged the concept of forum with personal websites! Of course that would not have been possible because I was using tools that were built by others – a forum software and a hosting software. Even though I had a computing degree and was capable of customizing some of the code in those software, I was nowhere near the creation of an application from the ground-up, which was essentially what was needed. I suppose I was also not thinking of conquering the world, although the reach of my sites did reach all corners of the globe. Sometimes we can be at the brink of a new concept that would change the world and it just brushes by because we constrain ourselves!
This site, although it uses a blog platform, is aimed at a more professional level; I do not intend to post what I had for lunch or where I am at the moment (we have Facebook for that). Instead, expect to find observations, analysis and insights of yours humbly.
Please feel free to send me an email or IM. I would love to hear your thoughts on anything on this website, or to simply chat.
Thanks for reading.
Dax
