South China Morning Post yesterday broke news about how Facebook repeatedly deleted groups of political opposition in Hong Kong:

“A Facebook group with 84,298 members formed to oppose the pro-establishment DAB was deleted
Kelvin Sit Tak-O, who runs a discussion group that opposes the pro-establishment party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), said his group’s Facebook page was shut down without notice on Thursday. The group had 84,298 members and was aiming for 100,000… The closures could have been triggered by opponents flagging the group as “abusive” with Facebook administrators, Mr. Sit speculated. A spokesperson for Facebook was not immediately available for comment.”

As blogger Joanne Ooi cites:

“‘Apart from my own group, I’ve heard that other groups with an anti-DAB message have also been closed. We’ve written complaint letters, but we’ve only received standard replies about how [Facebook] is working on this case,’ Sit said. …
Kelvin told me that although the original page is still down, he relaunched a new page, which has already hit 50,000 members since it launched 3 days ago.”

Hong Kong’s DAB is a pro-Beijing political party. Party leader Ma Lik denies the Tiananmen massacre, as Wikipedia has it.

Hong Kongers have always seen themselves as China’s last bastion of free speech — it’s sad to see how this is jeopardized by Facebook’s supposed anticipatory obedience.

Kotaku and Gizmodo point to a 3D-map of Hong Kong recently:

“While Google Maps is pretty useful at the moment - especially Street View - we can’t help but look at this Chinese map of Hong Kong and wish that, instead of “Street View”, we could instead have “SimCity View”.
This map is real (though not provided by Google), and accurate, and can be used to plot your course or find landmarks as easily as you can on Google Maps…”

Only that it isn’t accurate… I mean, just take a look at Central; what about the pier-area around the IFC2? I’ve been passing this neighborhood myself quite often on my way to catch a ferry — shouldn’t there be an additional road and a walkway? Instead there is a bunch of greenery to be seen, which does not exist to that extend. And what about the area on the backside of HSBC? The 3D-view shows a large park-area there — so where’s Queen’s Road, or Lower and Upper Albert Road and Robinson Road? Must have been overgrown since last time I’ve been there. Oh, and if you scroll towards Kowloon-side, then you’ll find that the map just stops at Boundary Street. I guess it means that this is a map of Hong Kong within its boundaries of 1898.

This map is a nice, cute and useless gimmick. I prefer the homegrown centamap.com any day. By the way, the map’s provider Edoshi is a Mainland-based company specializing in such 3D-views of a variety of large cities like Hanzhou.

Two days ago IT security provider McAfee published the new version of its Most Dangerous TLDs Report, as announced on CNET before. According to McAfee, this years’ most malware ridden TLD is .hk–which caught some commenters and me by surprise after reading CNET’s announcement (as CNET linked to last year’s version of the malware report). Last year, HK was on position 28, in the ballpark of a few European TLDs (like Belgium)–even 20 places better than domains from the US. This means that during the past months the threat-level of .hk-domains jumped by a stunning 27 places, even surpassing Mainland China!

Says research analyst Shane Keats: “Even if the greatest percentage of dangerous sites use the .hk domain, that doesn’t mean they are all based in Hong Kong or that more malware distributors are located there… Many sites, particularly the malicious software sites, choose the most affordable domain registrars in countries with the least regulation, so usually they are not located in that country…”

Last time I checked on local HK-domains, they came at a hefty extra-charge (one of the reasons why Linking People’s web-address is a .com). I wonder if this duty was changed during last year? Anybody any ideas?

Facebook, possibly the planet’s highest valued online-business, seems to soak up investments like a sponge currently. While the rumour about an upcoming hedge-fond investment might or might not be true, the $240 million they raise from Microsoft at the moment pushes the bar to a total funding of $338 million.
The newest investor to step into the ring is Hong Kong’s illustrious billionaire and Asia’s most powerful man 李嘉誠 Li Ka-Shing with an allotment of $60 million, with an option to invest another $60 million (according to AllThingsD).
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We had quite a long blog-out in the past weeks–partially due to my notebook being in repair for around a week, partially due to heavy workload. Stefan and me have hauled Linking People to its new home in the recent weeks, a linux-server in Canada, powered mainly by green energy (no kidding).
While I’m looking after the German part of our business at the moment, I missed the Web 2.0 Startup Meetup in Hong Kong in August–thanks P.K. from Team and Concept for pointing me to the event. I would have loved to show up, according to Angus Lau’s posting at 852signal, it was seemingly a nice event.
On Sept 16-21, 2007, the Hong Kong web community will meet up at web gathering 3 for some chitchat with Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech of Silicon Valley. Sorry, guys, I’m still going to be stuck in Germany at that moment. Read more here, if you want to attend. I’m going back to my work in the meantime…

There are so few Web2.0 companies in Hong Kong, even a yakuza could count them with one hand only. At least those few guys should know each other, if not forming a business network, right? Therefor I met with P.K. Chan–CEO of Team and Concept–some days ago for a coffee session.

P.K. just came back from the US, where TnC showcased their product Editgrid at the recent Under the Radar Conference: why Office 2.0 matters. Editgrid is an impressive collaborative online spreadsheet-editor, just out of beta.
What I like about Editgrid is its clean design. P.K. and me discussed why so many Hong Kong websites feature a seemingly dull and unprofessional design. Agreed, webdesign doesn’t matter so much in Hong Kong, but its websites are an important part of Hong Kong’s global media-presence–and mostly the only thing being visible overseas. So it seems to be a too easy way out for the majority of businesses here, to skip web-design (or internet-adoption, for that matter) alltogether.

Anyway, it was a nice reaching-out and I guess I will try to keep contact to P.K. and TnC for some potential synergy effects.

I really like Flickr a lot (despite their utterly flawed user-experience) — images on our blog are hosted at Flickr, for example. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder at a news I read at BBC UK, about Flickr going local in Asia, namely in Hong Kong and Taiwan:

“The site, using traditional Chinese characters, will initially target users in Hong Kong. The next target market will be Taiwan, it said. Yahoo did not mention any plans to build its China user-base. The Flickr in Chinese will offer all the main features which are available on the English-language version, a spokeswoman said.” (BBC News)

Pardon me, but a localized Flickr in Hong Kong doesn’t spell big business to me. Even though Hong Kongers are (in my opinion) vigorous picture-takers, I have yet to be convinced that Flickr HK will extend the chinese-speaking userbase here beyond the ones already using Flickr.
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Wired’s mouthpiece for Yu Ling, wife of reporter and dissident Wang Xiaoning, allegedly being jailed by a whistle-blowing of Yahoo Hong Kong:

“Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door — 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu’s hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it’s done in China. This is how the internet police grab you. … ‘Yahoo betrayed my husband and deprived him of freedom,’ Yu says through a translator, her voice trembling. ‘Yahoo must learn its lesson.’” (Wired.com)

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Financial Secretary Henry Tang presented a $20 billion surplus package of tax rebates and social and economic promotions last week, after Hong Kong’s government recorded a record budget surplus for 2006/07. This put an end to a lot speculations which were on the beat lately, on how the cash injection should be spend best. Details can be found here.

$210 million will be spend to “install WiFi networks enabling free Internet access by the public in government facilities such as libraries, parks and community halls.” (news.gov.hk)
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