Loogic English

The mobile version of Tuenti was the theme of the conversation on Tuesday in Seville with the friends of Flowers in Space. It was Bernardo Hernandez himself who talked to us about it and we immediately turned to our mobiles to try it out.

The first thing that draws your attention the moment you enter m.tuenti.com is that it asks you what you are doing at the moment, which means we are talking of microblogging or a Twitter within Tuenti.

If you continue surfing, you see that you have access to your profile, to see your list of contacts and to the messages in your inbox. Clicking on the profile of your contacts, you can see the photos they have uploaded, and as Javi Hernandez puts it, this could be a danger for the productivity in classrooms because of students browsing photos on their mobiles.

Another topic that I find very interesting is the phone list, from which you can access those contacts who have entered their mobile phone number in their profile information, so now there could be people who have their phone list in Tuenti.

I would like to know if, with the launch of the mobile version of Tuenti, there would be an increase in flat-rate contracts for internet connection on the mobile. I have the impression that with time, many young people would want to go for a flat rate to avoid seeing their mobile phone bill shoot up with the use of m.tuenti.com

Ana Belen Ramon, better known as Missha in the world of web design has informed me about the launch (in the “preview release” phase) of Wolpy, a social network for travellers to share their travel experiencies.

Missha is responsible for the design of Wolpy (I love the design, congratulations Missha) and the programming has been done by Miguel Abad.

Having launched in “preview release” for now, Wolpy only allows you to create a map of the places you have visited in your trips and to carry out reviews of the places mentioned. As in all social networks that take pride in themselves, you can share these places with your friends and get to know the places that they have visited.

Once the launch phase is over, the next step would be to allow users to upload photos and videos of their trips besides being able to recommend other users on the places to visit.

The ultimate goal of Wolpy is to become a collaborative travel guide on a global scale.

We first wrote about Tuenti on the 29th of December, 2006 (I think it was our first exclusive in Loogic).

On the 4th of March 2008, the CEO of Tuenti, Zaryn Dentzel, announces in Mobuzz TV that they have reached 2.000 million page views a month.

Incredible isn’t it? I’ve been talking often to the folks at Tuenti and the truth is that they are a role model for all of us who are into creating a business on the internet. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons for their success:

1) A young but very well prepared team that doesn’t like to boast of its achievements, but that has been hardened by the thousand battles they’ve had to confront with in the last few months to meet the demands of an enormous growth in traffic.

2) Highly influential investors with great experience (Bernardo Hernandez and Rodolfo Carpintier among them) who have had their role in advising the team of Tuenti, and that has been decisive in taking them where they are today.

3) A closed model (one can enter only through invitation) that has led them to turn into a social phenomenon, so much so that there’s talk of Tuenti on the streets, and even some people have created songs, recorded them with their friends and uploaded them to YouTube.

4) No advertising, at least for the moment, which has allowed them to dedicate all of their time to grow without worrying about making money. Now the time will come when they can make good use of all that traffic to earn money.

5) Right time and right place to start. They started a year ago when Facebook was not looking towards Spain as a market to expand, and a country where the users were navigating in portals and forums, not in social networks. For Tuenti, being the first in their market has been a great idea.

Impressive, right? The best thing is that the success of Tuenti is a reality and I’m sure that it will be an incentive for all.

As we stated earlier, of the applications presented in the Madrid Facebook Developer Garage, the one I thought was most interesting was Meet Your Friends developed for eDreams by Demini.

To make a comparison, we could say that Meet Your Friends is a Dopplr within Facebook and with more of a focus towards leisure travel than business travel.

I found it very interesting that upon entering Facebook, eDreams has not limited itself to creating a version of its portal or develop a search application for cheap flights which would be the most basic thing to do, but rather they have stretched to create a well-rounded tool that could be very interesting for travellers and tourists who have Facebook as their preferred social network.

Although the developers of Meet Your Friends are still carrying out some improvements in the application, I think it’s worth giving it a try and check out its integration with Google Maps within Facebook, the community options that it presents, …

Surely we will soon be able to see how well received it is in the Facebook community and whether it goes on to have the kind of success enjoyed by other applications like TripAdvisor.

Sonico is growing a lot. The experience of Fnbox with Flodeo is helping it to turn its social network into a reference in Latin America, and with time, its influence is sure to reach the Iberian peninsula.

With the launch of the portuguese version of Sonico, they have also announced that the number of registered users have crossed the mark of 8 million. Previously we had seen bigger numbers and that was due to the participation of users who utilized the services Cumplealerta (Birthday alert) and Postales (postal cards). Now we know that the number of users registered specifically in Sonico is 8 million and that’s a spectacular growth compared to the 3.6 million registered users in the month of November.

As for the portuguese version of Sonico, the goal is to have a strong entry in Brasil where Orkut is the leader but where Fnbox is also present with services of postal cards and birthday alerts that will help it to go for a rapid expansion.