Welcome
After 9 years of hibernation, daxchow.com is finally live online. Since I registered this domain almost a decade 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 have decided to set up a personalized website with some writings of my own to spur discussions and interactions with friends, colleagues, clients and those-I’ve-yet-to-be acquainted. I enjoy keeping abreast of the news and this site will allow me to share some of my thoughts.
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. I certainly hope that some of my musings would at least be intelligible and gladly welcome all feedback.
And now to whet your appetite with a little story of my own…
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 and Twitter. Those were times of web-forums and discussion boards, which are still popular now but pale in comparison to the social networking sites of today who generally have upwards of 100 million users. The sites that I developed were “communties-of-practice” forums that were in a 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.
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! Unfortunately, that would not have been possible because I was using tools that were built by others. I used a forum software and a hosting software written by other developers. Even though I had a computing degree and was capable of customizing some of the code in those software, I was nowhere near the effort required for creating an application from the ground-up, which was essentially what was needed. I suppose I was not thinking of conquering the world, although the reach of my sites did cover 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!
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 Chow
December 2010
