Press: The following is an article I published on "Programmer" in February
What is local is the world
——Recording the 15 -year development history of Chinese online communities
At the beginning of the new year of 2010 , there was a sudden thunder in the Internet field, and Google planned to shut down its operations in China. Reminiscent of Yahoo , eBay , etc. losing ground in the Chinese market one after another —foreign IT giants seem to have fallen into the "Chinese Internet curse". How to understand the Chinese Internet? The founder of Xici Temple, Thief Ma, provided a brand new clue in an interview. He pointed out: "From the day the Internet was born, it has had the characteristics of a community." Therefore, if you want to get rid of the fog of the Chinese Internet market, it is of great benefit to start from the online community and take stock of its development history and rules over the past 10 years of.
Catching Fire: The Rise of Community
Tracing back to the original state of the Chinese online community, we must mention a communication network in China in the early 1990s—China Fido Network (ie CFido ). Famous CFido websites include "Great Wall Station", "Hand in Hand" and "New Moon". The earliest batch of "community netizens" in China gathered there. They basically have a communication and computer education background. Community activities are generally to exchange small software written by themselves, exchange encryption and decryption experience, and occasionally chat about life experience and so on. Of course, the CFido network is not the internet based on the TCP/IP protocol that we are familiar with now . It is a network connected by telephone lines, and letters are transferred between terminals in a point-to-point manner. But if you list the names of the players at that time, such as Ding Lei and Ma Huateng...you will find out how far-reaching impact CFido has had on today's Internet community.
The real Chinese community in the strict sense was in August 1995. Ace , a student of Tsinghua University , set up a BBS on a 386/Linux in the laboratory in order to enable Tsinghua University to have its own BBS . The system used was Yelin University Style of National Taiwan University. Station Palm BBS . Then Ming and Lucky also participated and transferred the system to a Sun Sparc 20 (64M memory ) machine. On August 8 , this BBS system was officially opened and named "Shuimu Tsinghua Station", and the IP at this time was 166.111.1.11 .
With the symbol of Shuimu Qinghua, the Chinese community began to develop like a spark. According to Qiu Song, the editor-in-chief of Chinaz , from 1995 to 2000 , it was basically in the popularization stage of the civilian Internet, and the Chinese community was mainly introduced into China by some technical enthusiasts through Sinicization and translation of foreign communities. Therefore, community application services are generally relatively simple. It's just that form becomes the framework of basic communication.
Therefore, at this time, the technology, capital, and market thresholds for building a community are not high, which gives countless obscure but innovative grassroots programmers a chance. The most representative one is Thief (real name: Liu Hu), who created a famous Chinese community-Xici Hutong almost unintentionally . Moreover, his website building concept and service model are not only the condensation of the successful Chinese community at that stage, but even today, they are quite avant-garde.
Thief, who was a teacher at the Nanjing Power Transportation School at that time, first came into contact with the Internet around 1995. He recalled to reporters: "The Internet at that time actually had very little content, except for company websites like Microsoft , and only BBS communities." For this purpose, he wandered around many BBS communities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, such as Silitongfang and Jiaxing Forum. He found that the user experience of BBS design styles on both sides of the Taiwan Strait is obviously different. He said: "Communities in mainland China, information organization is based on a tree structure, such as a focus interview forum, it will have a topic, people will follow up to reply, and then someone will reply... The whole is a tree structure. But I think this structure looks particularly awkward, because I prefer the list structure presented by the Taiwanese community." So he used ASP technology to make a simple list BBS around 1998 , which created a local style BBS. The name of the forum is Xici Hutong, and some hot topic sections such as "English", "Emotional Life", "Martial Arts Stories" and so on have been set up. The first batch of netizens who were "fooled" to come in and visit were all the friends that the thieves had made and acquainted with when they were in the forum. Thinking that such a small community is very interesting, the thief quickly organized the first gathering of Xici netizens (only a few netizens participated in total). But when he organized a second party a few months later, it suddenly became "not fun".
Thief said: "This is the most impressive gathering of netizens in Xici Temple. At that time, more than 50 people came. I don't know who is who, and I have no way to know each other. So since then, basically we I started to encourage moderators on the site, and held group-based gatherings, small-scale gatherings, because the group is the unit, for example, if I get 20 or 30 people, they can still communicate with each other, establish contact with each other, and build relationships, but Gatherings of dozens or hundreds of people are meaningless.” It was also an opportunity for this gathering, and Thief made a move that had a decisive impact on the development of Xici Temple—not only allowing netizens to open their own forums, but also granting moderators all rights to the forum. Sovereignty (such as page closures, mergers, advertising operations, etc.). Why such a move? The thief’s answer was very simple: “Because I am a programmer, and the characteristic of programmers is that they don’t know much about anything except programs, so I think since I don’t understand, let more people come in to do it, because no matter how smart you are alone There is no group of people who are smart, so everyone will think of different topics, different themes, every detail, every small topic will be done by someone, and the final product must be better than what I thought alone."
For this Web 2.0 -conscious decision, perhaps the thieves themselves did not realize that it would bring explosive growth to Xici Temple. By August 1999 , Xici Temple had more than one million online users . Xici has users all over the country and abroad, and the user group spans all ages and occupational levels. It is said that Thieves introduced that many netizens have obtained rich returns through the platform of Xici, and the monthly advertising revenue of some celebrity pages has reached more than 100,000 yuan. There are even some netizens who have changed their lives because of this. For example, the moderator of a popular current affairs commentary used to be an ordinary waiter in a certain hotel. It is unbelievable that Xici, which achieved such remarkable achievements in the late 1990s, relied on the monthly salary of 600 yuan as a teacher for a long time.
Competing for the throne: products and technology are the premise
From the early rise of Xici, it can be seen that openness, focus on user experience and demand are important factors to promote growth. However, with the increase in the number of online users in Xici, more and more requirements for technology and product architecture have emerged. Especially around 2003 and 2004 , the technical bottleneck seriously affected the user experience, causing Xici to lose a large number of users. The thieves said: "How bad is it? Basically, it will crash at least once a week, and the whole site will hang up, but it's not a big problem. , or the two-day posts are lost, and the data will be lost. This is completely unacceptable to users.” For this reason, in 2005, Xici , under the auspices of the thieves, conducted a thorough review on access speed, scalability, and user-friendliness. The code refactoring has just come back on track. However, the stagnation of Xici Temple not only led to the rise of communities such as Tianya, but also gave some local urban online communities a chance to breathe. Of course, for countless small and medium-sized community forums in China, it is difficult to have a programmer hero like Thief who can design a system by himself. Therefore, community and forum solutions provided by third parties are getting more and more favored by everyone.
Speaking of community website building technology, Qiu Song commented: " As the base of netizens expands, more and more people find that they cannot achieve in-depth communication demands only through IM and chat rooms, and more people tend to keep written records, The BBS communication method for topic debates became popular after 2000, domestic communities written in CGI languages such as BBS2000 and LeoBBS began to rise, and at the same time the army of localization was also growing, such as VBB , IPB , PHPBB , etc.
The original forum program was developed with Perl scripting language, but as the ASP language became the mainstream of applications due to the advantages of the hard culture of the Windows platform and the ease of application, the ASP community became popular, represented by the Dongwang forum DVBBS . Successfully occupied more than 65% of the market position. At this time, PHP -like community programs began to emerge. Qiu Song said: " PHP forum programs mainly come from two sources, one part is through Sinicization and modification of foreign source codes; the other part is independently developed by technicians." The outstanding representatives of the two are Discuz and phpwind . Discuz is derived from the earliest Sinicization and translation faction, and it is also the only remaining one. Qiu Song believes that the rise of Discuz is due to the timing and a series of business momentum: " Because of the advantages in the rapid development of the Web , through the announcement of open source, free commercial licenses, and hand-in-hand conversion actions, Discuz took advantage of the stop of ASP language updates and ASP .netThe timing of poor connection will continue to erode the market of Dongwang. "In contrast, the success of phpwind , in his opinion, is mainly due to focus and pragmatism: " phpwind first started to develop PHP text forums. It has high efficiency and is not inferior to Discuz in terms of functions . Compared with Discuz , phpwind is more low-key than a technician. They are more focused on the application of the network community and keenly discover the strategy of some forum programs in local community application services. Flaws, so as to focus on the community portal . "
As the three most classic forum programs in the development history of Chinese online communities: Dongwang, phpwind , and Discuz objectively solve the problems of cost and secondary development in terms of technical factors for Chinese webmasters of all sizes, and promote the rapid growth of online forums . Hualong Lane in Changzhou is an urban community focusing on the exchange of consumer experience and life information. Since it started operation in 2005 , it has grown rapidly. At present, it has 550,000 registered users, and the number of concurrent online users has reached about 13,000 . . The increase in the number of visitors will naturally bring pressure on the server load. Qian Yu, general manager of Hualong Lane, said in an interview with our reporter: "As the number of access connections and website interactions increase, server resources cannot bear such a heavy pressure. In the past, it could only be solved by continuously increasing hardware. Solve this problem. We hope to have a better community program to achieve an excellent infrastructure at the bottom layer and greatly optimize server access performance." Qian Yu said with deep emotion: "The structure of the forum product, the core technology of the product, It is the only driving force to continuously promote the development of the website, the means of operation are similar to each other, and technology is still very important.”
With the transformation of Dongwang into web games, the domestic community solution market is basically divided between phpwind and Discuz.
Chu-Han Struggle: SNS and E-Commerce
When phpwind and Discuz are competing between Chu and Han, the form of online forums is also constantly changing and innovating, such as NetEase's comments, Baidu Post Bar, etc. Marked by 2005, as online communities led by Facebook and MySpace swept the world, SNS began to gain popularity, and gradually formed a new type of network that focused on relationships (or both content and relationships) from traditional forums that focused on content. community concept. Changes in the form of forums and changes in value positioning will inevitably bring about diversification of profit models for site owners—advertising, value-added applications, entertainment, e-commerce, etc. For phpwind and Discuz, the foundation of their survival is whether their technology and services can effectively meet the profit-making goals of webmasters. Therefore, with the diversification of community profit models, the question of "how to effectively position forum products in the market" is inevitably in front of them. Facts have proved that the two manufacturers have chosen different development routes from each other.
Kangshengchuang wants to see the huge profit potential of online entertainment applications and games, and hopes to combine this business model with a strong membership base. However, phpwind is located in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions with the best local community development in China. It has an intuitive feeling for the commercialization direction of the community, and gradually concludes another direction. It believes that the local life consumption of local websites has a huge prospect. E-commerce is the direction. Wang Xueji believes: "Just like traditional channels, small shops with weak popularity can only become an ordinary sales terminal, while comprehensive supermarkets with strong popularity not only have more voice in the industrial chain, but also can benefit from the local market. In traditional 2nd and 3rd tier cities, merchants’ advertisements or other marketing inputs either flow into large portals or invest in traditional marketing methods. Strong local websites have become crucial to local merchants in terms of price and marketing effect. More valuable, with a strong user base, the local community has won more voices. From the perspective of the Internet industry's profit path, it no longer depends on the upstream resources of the industry, and has opened up another flow." In this way since 2008 From then on, phpwind and Discuz began to part ways in terms of development direction and positioning.
自然，两家社区解决方案厂商发展模式的变革，不可避免造成了客户的重新分流。太湖明珠网的东林书院论坛2007年时开始启用Discuz，仅仅一年多后却进一步转成了phpwind，对此太湖明珠网总监林刚向记者解释道：“选择phpwind的原因，首先是觉得康盛创想自从2008年推出Discuz7.0以来的发展方向和我们的目标不吻合，我们不看好SNS。其次是phpwind 的团队很有活力和进取心，一切对市场有利的他们都会去实施。第三，phpwind在淘宝上的内在渠道：随着phpwind被阿里巴巴收购，社区程序跟淘宝之间的关联被打通了，而我们各个地方社区对于电子商务市场，都是具有浓厚兴趣的。可以这样讲，我们认为地方网站去做SNS，必死无疑；而phpwind社区程序的研发方向则是向电子商务走。”
看来phpwind 和Discuz彼此竞争成败的关键，主要取决于对中国网络社区未来主流发展趋势的判断。对此响马认为凡是一个走向成熟的社区一定是本地的，他说：“因为一个所谓跨地区、全国性的社区，其实是一个很空的东西：一群人在那讨论不实际的东西。比如我们仔细观察新浪社区、网易社区、搜狐社区——其实都是北京社区。很多用户活动，比如旅游等参与者都是北京人，相反外地用户很少。在一个所谓的全国性的社区，用户很难得到实在的价值。如果两个网友都是南京或者北京人，他们更容易获得实际的沟通，比如一块出去喝点酒之类。”正是基于这样的理念，响马透露，从2007年开始西祠重构了他们的推荐系统，针对不同城市的用户推荐他们本地的资源，并展开各种商业线索服务，从而形成“各个城市自己的西祠胡同”。很显然西祠胡同将社区“本地门户+电子商务”作为发展重心，与phpwind的理念不谋而合。
整合与共赢：社区商务生态链
不管“本地门户+电子商务”是否真的代表了未来的潮流，它在当下令无数中小站长怦然心动是不容置疑的，毕竟经营网站的投资回报始终是他们考虑的重心。但是，如何开展合适的商业模式，将社区与商业进行真正有效的结合，仍然是摆在无数社区经营者面前的难题。对于地方社区商业化的主要环节，house365前首席架构师、现宁哲网络科技创始人周宁认为：“存在两个层面，首先是实现收入的方式和来源。收入模式主要有三个：广告费、会员费、活动费用。广告费基于流量、受众的精准度、网站的影响力。会员费是社区型电子商务带来的，一般是通过打包的形式，例如配送线上商铺等。活动又称为互动营销，通过线上线下互动，增加体验环节，一方面增进买卖双方的信任感，另一方面也在集聚网站的人气。第二个层面，就是我们在销售什么？记得篱笆网的罗联栩老师说过，社区无非卖两样东西：卖产品、卖人头。也就是促进产品销售，或者召集需求人群。在这个过程中，网站的商业价值体现为广告或者活动。”
周宁认为将社区与商业化进行成功整合的例子是西祠的“花嫁频道”和化龙巷社区。前者将西祠婚庆相关板块按照业务流、服务流组合和聚焦，使得商业价值立即得到体现；后者通过媒体手段加大编辑的专业度，通过各种活动积极开展线上线下的互动，实现了虚拟与现实的紧密结合。当然并不是所有社区都这么成功，流量低广告卖不出去、商业模式单一且不够专业等问题均是困饶许多站长的心头之痛。但随着2009年４月左右，亚洲最大的网络零售商圈淘宝网携手phpwind启动“社区创业”计划，让无数站长看到了增长的契机。在该计划中，基于phpwind技术平台，将为几十万家论坛将注入网络购物元素，并为其每天覆盖的上亿人群提供网络创业平台。值得注意的是，“社区创业”计划提供的创业模式中，除了传统的“淘宝开店”模式外，还推出了“淘宝客”模式——由社区里口碑好、专业知识丰富的人向消费者推荐产品，然后按成交量从商家那里收费。无疑，这不仅给诸多站长带来流量、新的盈利点，带来了商业运作的专业化，而且还形成了诸多符合地方特色的个性化产品。昆山热线花波向记者表示：“昆坛淘宝，已经让昆山热线论坛流量倍增，线上竞拍和秒杀等结合社区电子商务的活动，把社区的互动性推向了高潮！”
据业内人士分析，预计预计1-2年内，该项业务参与人群将超过百万，至少将为国内提供十万个直接就业机会。
此外，随着淘宝这样的跨地域综合性社区，与本地门户和行业垂直型网站的资源整合和相互渗透：一方面，它昭示着中国网络社区的某种趋势，即在全国范围内，网络社区电子商务生态链正在形成，未来岁月里并购和整合将不断上演；另一方面，地方社区借助一系列专业平台，其商业潜力将进一步被挖掘。展望2010年，周宁向记者预测——这将是地方社区的掘金年
2010：地方社区掘金年
盘点中文网络社区的历程，透过社区产品、技术以及人们交流方式的变迁，不难发现，互联网一方面无限拓宽了人们视野的广度，提高了沟通效率，但真正产生经济价值，还是立足于现实人类生活社区的深度挖掘。国际互联网企业拥有一流的技术和商业模式，但在本地化过程中，由于对中国的法律政策、文化风俗、国人生活习惯的不适应，自然功败垂成。
所以展望网络社区未来的发展趋势，相信会应验一句话：“本土的才是世界的”。而对于已经到来的2010年，随着越来越多的资金、技术、商业资源扶植本土社区，正如周宁预测而言——将是地方社区的掘金年。