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

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.