Author Archives: Aw Guo

Saying goodbye to Google China

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Eariler today, I followed a tweet from Twitter to this link, A new approach to China. After reading this entry, I felt so sad!

I'd been working as a vendor for Google China during Oct, 2008 to Apr, 2009. (Except some very detailed ActionScript codes, I have NOTHING TO DO with Google or Google China)

Personally, I am quite sure that every Googlers from Google China loves this country so much. Google China had tried its best to improve the search experience in China and had achieved a lot of great localized projects,  including Google Music. And I can't imagine how big trouble/pressure they've faced since it'd be a nightmare to censor every single word in the serach result pages. Even with the best affort, Google China was blamed for many times about "spreading illegal information" in search result pages.

Quit from this country would be a great relif for those hard-working engineers. (Though Baidu also faced the same troubles, they are based in Beijing and easy to control/compromise.)

Goodbye, Google (China)!

Pictures of Google's headquarter in China (via a friend of mine who's working at Google China):

Say bye to 2009, say hi to 2010!

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Happy New Year 2010, it seems to be a "better late than never" wish for now, ha.

As you guys might know, we've lost three biggest web sites: Twitter, Youtube, Facebook in 2009, we will surely lose more in 2010. So in the last day of 2009, I made a decision and moved ifgogo.com's hosting server from Beijing to Newark, NJ. And in 2010, My company's going to focus on markets outside mainland China.

It's not some bad news, and I'm not going to complain or angrily blame anyone! Blaming and complaining cannot change anything. Since most people don't care – they even don't think a bit about it! It's what those people deserved, and the improtant part is, they just enjoyed. I just understand now.

Let's enjoy our life in 2010 across the pacific and equator :)

Happy Single's Day!

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Today, I'd really like to introduce a very funny festival in China – The Single's Day(aka 光棍节). It's Nov 11, the famous Single's Day in China - a festival for single person 'invented' by some Chinese college students. (They picked up Nov 11 since 11-11 have so much 'single's)

The first time I knew this was in 2002. My freshman year in HUST. I do remember that night, after lights out, guys in our apartment started to shout and throw stuff outside the window to celebrate (in fact they are just having too much hormone #lol). Luckily our apartment was just next to a girl's apartment and they even shouted back. Then some of the guys got extremely excited and as you may guess – they almost threw all the stuff in their room then could throw, including a CRT monitor!! Hoho…no one had a good sleep that night…

Why Chinese people are so creative on this? I think, in western countries, people fall in love and even have sex at a much younger age than us. In China, due to our restricted traditional culture and college-entering pressure(actually very stupid and time-wasting education program), it's really hard to think about love in high school. So when the boys and girls enter a brand new pressure-free place, they would really find some way to change their poor life.

Frankly I'm really too old and too 'sweet' to celebrate, but Single's Day is really a good festival created by Chinese college students, so let's bless the singles :)

China blocks Google on June 24, Wednesday(Later unblocked)

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Update: Google is now unblocked. I am sure it's blocking rather than "technical maintaince" since it's working fine with proxies.

Now, Google is almost totally blocked in China. A lot of its products, like Google Reader, Google Mail(GMail), Google Code... is not accessible in mainland China.

What a shame for us. What a shame for the stupid kommunist!

Twitter is blocked in China finally!

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After Facebook, Youtube, Plurk, Twitter is now finally blocked in China. Though people have predicted this and I know it's sooner or later, it still make me so sad.

I am a super fan of Twitter and I have got nearly 4000 followers, 70% of which are from mainland China. Now I cannot talk to them and nor can they talk to me. some of our authors and readers are also very active in Twitter.

What a stupid censorship! What a shame!

FYI:

  1. In the "China Twitter user investigation" I made few weeks ago, more than 70% twitter users from China said they'd keep using Twitter with proxy servers. Only very few of them would consider to join other twitter-like services in China.
  2. Wikipedia is also blocked today!
  3. Bing.com and Live.com are also blocked!
  4. Almost all the Chinese twitter users are spreading #FUCKGFW, #FuckGFW and #fuckGFW around and it soon became the hottest Trending Topics couple of hours later!

What most Chinese fans think about LOST (TV) in China

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Some months ago, my friend Elliott Ng from the U.S asked me what Chinese LOST fans are thinking/discussing about LOST. I promised to post something here, and as the season 5 is now finished, I think it's time to share something here with you western LOST fans.

The easiest way to know what Chinese LOST fans are thinking about is to analysis the polls held by hot LOST forums in China. I collected some data from ydy.com, 1000fr.com, yyets.net(Some very popular online forums on foreign, mainly American TV series in China) and some of my friends, shared the results as follows:

  • Most Chinese LOST fans are male, 18-25. Few of the fans are under 18 or over 30.
  • Most Chinese fans think that Kate (42.29%) and Shannon (31.45%) are the most attractive women in LOST. Though Sun is the only main Asian character in LOST, she just got 14.67% votes. Polls held on some other small forums show that there're also a lot of Juliet fans.
  • Most Chinese fans hate Michael and Ana Lucia after SEASON 2. In a vote named "Who do you hate most", Michael (45.98%) and Ana Lucia(20.28%) got the most votes. Ben Linus only got 0.8% votes - I think that's due to the date of the poll (2006).
  • Most Chinese fans think that Sawyer(54.83%) is the most attractive man in LOST.
  • 95.59% of Chinese fans think that Ben Linus is cleverer than Charles Widmore.
  • 93.81% of Chinese fans prefer to watch the original TV (with subtitles) rather than a dubbed one.
  • In a poll named "Which one will Kate choose", Sawyer got 51.37%, Jack got 34.91% and the rest (13.72%) think that Kate would choose neither.
  • In a poll named "Who is the key people in LOST", John Locke got 35.39% in a lead, then are Jack (18.86%) and Walt(15.03%). Ben got very few votes.
  • In a poll named "Who do you want to stay with on that island", Jack got 70% FTW.
  • Most Chinese fans would NOT push the button when the count down reaches the end if they were the LOSTies.
  • Most Chinese fans think Locke or Ben should be the leader. The reason for Locke is "He never complained to others" while the reason for Ben is "He always has a plan".
  • 72.8% of Chinese fans think that Ben killed John for some unknown reasons. 7% think that Ben is just for stealing the information from John.

Though with lots of participators, those results above are the polls since 2005. They should represent the most condition here in China, especially for the past years but not for the current condition and the future. As the TV series goes on, there are lots of new comments on this series. For example, after the Jacob finally appeared in the Season 5 finale, there were also a lot of comments saying that LOST is just another story of "神仙打架，百姓遭殃" (Gods fight, human disaster). And more and more fans started to doubt that the writer of LOST would never explain his show gracefully on a scientific basis.

Though I've been attracted by LOST for so much, I have to admit that Prison Break in China is much more popular than LOST. I don't know why. Maybe most Chinese people love stories like the Shawshank Redemption - They are restricted/censored too much to be so non-harmonized:)

However, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes, just enjoy the show for yourself :)

(The pictures of Jack Shepherd below are from http://voote.com/)

New plugin: WordPress Comment Digg from IfGoGo

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Well, I'm glad to announce that my third plugin for WordPress – WordPress Comment Digg is now offically released, via the platform of ifgogo.com – a group of funny bloggers from China. Download Link on WordPress.org.

Thanks to Jun He, who helped me with a lot coding with MySQL and PHP. Here are some screenshots:

The live demo:

The Option page:

The mangement page: