Duc Ban’s blog | Standardizing your mind

“To be King, everyone have to fight” - Ban, Nguyen Duc.

Web 2.0 Vietnam are Zero. Everyone can say that. I have my own thousand of reasons to tell you, and my network pals too. They don’t build from people needs. They don’t have any platform to rely on. They cannot make money by their services blah blah blah…

The point is we still need these services alive. What’s for? To keep hope alive. Web 2.0 is our hope, and if these services getting better, we will use them.

Web 2.0 is the very trend of the Web, and we developers cannot working without following this trend. Web 2.0 changed the world, include the future of us, Vietnamese developers. We have PHP, python, Java, XHML, CSS, JavaScript… These programming languages are developed for the purpose of scripting languages can build big things. We have venture investors who risks their money on us. We have young and wise developers from all around Vietnam. We have our passion to build our own Web 2.0 realm. We have time and we really don’t want to waste it.

So, what do we need? All we need is a plan. A plan to define with kinds of utility we will provide. A plan to know what are our target audience needs. A plan to build our develop team and our platform system. A plan to make sure we can handle everything to get things done.

I myself also make a plan for every projects. To tell you the truth, all of my plans are suck, except my wedding plan. Yeah, FYI: today is my 2-months-wedding-anniversary. My wedding plan was run very smooth from the start to the end. I can tell you the reason why: I have a good partner, my beloved wife, and my wife have a huge experience from her friends wedding. Haha lucky us, right? OK, Let call it an experience.

After made a plan, just do it. The only thing you have to remember is your Web 2.0 will be the most application that you can never live without. You need a good UI for the front-end, and a good platform for the back-end. Good UI means you have to care about Usability and User Experience Design. Don’t ask Google about Jacok Nielsen because I think Joshua Porter is good for you. His book “Designing for Social Web” is a very helpful guide for you to know what do people expect from Web 2.0’s and its design. Good platform means how scalable is your system? Is it ready to serve one million users? When will your API system launch, so that developer can mash-up your application with other applications from other services? And what’s if all of the hackers in the world chose your site to make a competition?… Think about it if you don’t want to have a night mare after a morning wake-up?

Let me tell you a story: Ten years ago, Google was just start Google Search Engine with a very bad UI, what’s about now? Three years ago, Google just have an API is Adsence, what’s about now? The bad UI now become the good UI ever of sixty-one APIs (from Google DevFest team). Everything are suck from the start, our mission is make it getting better.

The last thing I have to tell you is: Don’t ever think that you are really someone. Keep thinking that you are a loser who always fights to make your things useful. Don’t ever try to get people’s attention by talk about statistic. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” - Benjamin Disraeli. In fact, I don’t know anyone from Vina Capital, IDG, or other venture capitals who seeks for Vietnamese start-up, because they don’t need to know about me now. My start-up is still suck now, so shy to say that but it’s true. But when is launched, I guarantee that all I talk to the them venture capitals is something really big from platform to front-end. And I swear I don’t tell any lie about it.

We are always hunger for Web utilities. And we always need them on the go. We tweet in the bus, we read news in our lunch, and we flickr-ed after our parties. What’s if some really useful Vietnamese utility launched? I don’t think I have to answer. Well, just make a plan, find some good partners, and do it.