Who Said Eva Wouldnt Come to Australia ?

number 9 aiight
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

How kewl the Australian market is actually alpha'ing some new MSN social networking tools. It also notes Yahoo360 launched a local version here, which usually means little more than localised ad inventory. It's all good though - More .au RSS feeds for us to index. Phil Holden, via Webpronews : "One of the reasons to be here this week has been that we were getting ready to deploy our first social networking trial, specifically within the Australian market. This new functionality is an extension to the existing Spaces service and is exposed as a module that one can add within one’s Space. Our approach to social networking is designed to enable a way for customers to communicate and connect in more meaningful way with their circle of friends and in particular their friends and their friends’ friends. We are doing this by adding this feature to our existing network – be it Messenger, Spaces or Mail rather than build a unique social network. That’s often a little different from other services and I’m interesting to see how things play out especially as My Spaces is doing pretty well in this market and just this week Yahoo launched their 360 service here. All in all it’s getting interesting in this area." I'm glad not every company is this smart :

"One of the obvious questions is why are we doing this only in Australia? Well at least it’s not only in the USA for a change! Basically when we were looking for a trial market we wanted to find somewhere that had an active Spaces customer base, a mature MSN market and somewhere where we thought we would get lots of feedback – good and bad. Although many markets probably fit that bill we ended up choosing Australia and I can say I’m not complaining right now! "