The Fourth Estate

Putting the Social into Conscience

 

Waking up every morning in China and watching the daily flood of images from the Sichuan earthquake has been both devastating and moving. But there has also been an interesting social media dimension to the disaster worth noting.

The same nationalist fervor that gripped Chinese bloggers during the Tibet and Torch relay protests, has been replaced by a collective sense of action in recent days - played out across SMS, QQ, Twitter and local Chinese BBS networks. Twitter apparently broke the news about the earthquake before the official earthquake tracking agency. QQ has aggregated video shot by its users from many of the affected areas, while amazing footage from mobile phones quickly found its way onto Tudou. And on the fund raising side, China Mobile has set up an effective system which lets subscribers donate by sending an SMS, which then gets charged to your phone bill. It's the future of charitable action. For more details keep an eye on Global Voices for their ongoing coverage.

Instant Gratification

 

I don't think its any accident that social services like Twitter have lately experienced a rapid increase in adoption. Along with email, Instant Messaging was right there at the very beginning of the Web. But now, IM no longer exists in a vacuum. It's integrated in wide variety of other communications ecosystems including mobile text, social networking, blogging, status updates and feed aggregators. For me, Twitter was a toy on launch. Now that I'm addicted to Friendfeed, its utility has increased ten fold.

That's something to keep in mind as China's own IM boom continues to escalate. The China Web2.0 Review blog has posted some great stats on the phenomenon. QQ accounts for about 78% market share among totally 390 million active IM accounts in China. MSN Live Messenger has about 19 million active users, accounting for 4.9% market shared, followed by Sina UC (4.1%) and Fetion (3.7%). QQ have been very agile in using their dominance to introduce a wide variety of other integrated products. But well funded competitors are now in close pursuit, including China Mobile's Fetion service which facilitates free texting between PCs and mobiles, and Baidu's Hi platform. Two weeks after launch Baidu already claims that over 1 million people have tried their new IM service.