Interviewing MyTupa Star on Motivation of Transfer

Written by Luyi Chen on April 1, 2007
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mytupaShanghai based MyTupa is new Myspace like service launched in Feb. 2007. The name is said to be a combine of Youtube and Myspace. It’s probably better to forget Youtube, because there’s no video on the site.

William Zhu, CEO and founder, takes a distinct approach to promote the service with his blog. He announced to medias several weeks ago that he will use his blog to change for venture capital. Translation: he will record the procedure of raising the first round funding on his blog with details of interaction with venture capitals. William Zhu is also the founder of Rongshuxia, a famous literature community in pre web2.0 age.

XiaoboRecently Xiaobo, a Shanghai based IT journalist transferred from Baidu space to Mytupa. So I asked her why she is doing this. I informed her that the service doesn’t provide RSS and users must register to provide comments. Following is her answer:

1. I started to love it in the beginning of the registration process. You should have a try.

2. For me, SNS is a place to live and hang on, so it’s not important if it has RSS or not. If I subscribe to someone’s RSS, it must be due to his knowledge, no because of SNS. So this is not a problem for me, most of the time SNS is not suitable for self publishing.

Mytupa’s front-end is not well developed yet, far less perfect than Baidu Space, but the interactive experience it provides me is different from the loneliness I felt when I was using Baidu Space. In technology aspects, I believe Mytupa will become better in the future.

3. The fun of playing, laughing and fighting on this website is probably due to personality of William Zhu and his team. Pay attention to an ID called Mytupa which is responsible for announcement. All his response to questions of commenters are very funny. It’s like a website by a group of guys with spoofing culture, but very friendly, it’s very important for SNS site. As to not being able to leave comment from unregistered users, this is a way to enhance interaction so that commenters won’t just be weird IDs.

Over all, I am an emotional person. Transferring to MyTupa is totally a user behavior, not related to my career. That being said, all the above three points are resulted from my feeling as a user. As to rational analysis of SNS, I am working on a report on SNS, which only slightly touches MyTupa. For more experience, you are recommended to play with it.

So, I have played with it. In its current stage, the service of Mytupa is really common. Users can write blog, upload pictures with 50M quota. They can tag and bookmark other users, blog posts and photos. There’s a search feature to find users with certain characters. That’s pretty much all, except that a 2D barcode at bottom right corner of user profile shows some ambitious of the service.

To understand the whole idea of the business, you might want to take a look at a strip down version of their business plan published by William Zhu on his blog. The answer to those barcode is that MyTupa is aiming at wireless social networking. In the future, there will be three components of the service: the website, Wifi spots, handheld hardware devices. To my impression, they are going to build a wireless platform for people to get connected easily after they meets each other in any context. It probably enables simplified electronics name card exchanging.

In its registration procedure, users are asked to select three words to best describe themselves. Then later, their friends can vote and change their selections, so users will know difference between impression from friends and their self evaluation. Further, MyTupa expects to form community around these personalities. Imagine a discussion board full of self-esteem people.

At the end of their business plan, I find they describe their targeting user as middle class. This is not a well defined class in China, though it’s interesting, since not many SNSs are mentioning this.

MyTupa is seeking first round funding for US$1M-2M. The venture capital must be willing to open source the procedure on William Zhu’s blog.

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2 Responses to “Interviewing MyTupa Star on Motivation of Transfer”

  1. Calvin on April 24th, 2007 2:49 am

    Dear William,

    Very interesting indeed !
    How do I get in contact with you.
    Do send me your email and contact details :
    calvin@ilemon.cn

    Calvin

  2. oklidmifcr on July 4th, 2007 2:28 am

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