Jean-Francois Amadei // 大家好！
My name is Jean-François Amadei, I'm a 24 years old guy living between Hong Kong and Taipei. I'm a former Technology Evangelist at Toro-Asia.com and Digital Media Strategist at Ogilvy Digital Influence HK. I'm currently working on a new Taipei based venture in the mobile application business.
You always find strange stuff in Taiwan (the best and the worst) and I saw one last night in NCCU. Before showing you the picture, I must mention that NCCU (國立政治大學) is a university (where I was a student once) located in Taipei and mainly ruled by "blue" (KMT) people following the "blue" guideline, thus seeing stuff related to mainland china (such as mainland newspapers, teachers and even students) is quite common. But this was quite awkward :
I have to say that I was surprised when I first saw this magazine in a 7-11 store (I was searching for the Taiwanese edition of Milk Magazine). It's obviously not edited (nor endorsed IMO) by Facebook Inc. and it seems to be more focused on the casuals games (huge market over here, people are just crazy about Restaurant City or Happy Farmers) available on the platform than the social aspect.
However, this little discovery is quite interesting. When I was working at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, I had to conduct numerous research on social medias in Asia and when it came about Taiwan and Social Networks, Wretch.cc always came first in term of number of users and pages view. If Wretch.cc is still (I need to check) the first social network on the island, it shows how in a really short period of time (I recall that in January 2008 none of my Taiwanese friends ever heard of Facebook) Facebook took over the Taiwanese and Hong Kongese users in such extent that some people think that the edition of a magazine would be a valuable opportunity. I think it's Bernard Leong that first talk about that, Facebook really need to open an Asia HQ. Some people might say that Facebook is still struggling in China (less than 500k users...), Korea and Japan where Renren (Ex Xiaonei), Cyworld and Mixi and practically ubiquitous and that it's useless to dig further in these markets. But nowadays we're living in a world where people travel, study abroad and interact a lot each other, thus when a Chinese has friends in Europe, US and wants to keep in touch with them, which social network do you think they would use?
