What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007? According to GigaOm’s Blake Snow in “GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs”, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Runescape are leading the pack, subscriber-wise. Runner-ups further down the list include Club Penguin, Webkinz and Guild Wars – you might object with the compilation of competitors here like some commenters who are missing virtual worlds like Maple Story, Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, Final Fantasy XI and so on. But it’s already quite a smorgasbord of massive avatar chats and hardcore-mmorpgs. It’s pretty much a comparison of apples to oranges raising the question of a more detailed definition of the word MMO (massively multiplayer online world/game). Do Habbo Hotel and Webkinz fall into the definition of a multiplayer game? It’s a similar problem like the compilation of the top 10 social networks (where sites like Gaia Online had their place, too).
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A few recommended reads from the past days: China Economic Review has an insightful recap about Yahoo’s whistle-blowing incident about the fate of Chinese reporter and dissident Shi Tao. I find one assumption especially noteworthy:

“Yahoo itself is guilty of (…) a lack of foresight concerning the risks of locating user information in China (Google, for example, keeps its servers offshore, although this arrangement has yet to be properly tested)”

Locating the server which houses your business is really an important and delicate decision. We moved our digital home to Canada lately after a lot of considerations.

Two more interesting tidbits about Mainland China: China Web 2.0 Review blogs about a report called “Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web”. According to this report, around 1.5 percent of China’s 145.000 most commonly visited websites are infected with malicious code which might introduce trojans and viruses to their users’ computers. Phew, I wonder about similar statistics for the US or Europe — anybody any ideas?

And finally, check out this article from Danwei about Milk. Milk is an acclaimed magazine about pop-culture, style and design published in Hong Kong, which is now available in Mainland, too. The Mainland Milk does not seem to be as delicious as the original…:

“the initial reaction seems to be disappointment, at least from the people who had been eagerly anticipating the magazine’s arrival. Members of the milk group on Douban, a social networking service oriented toward students and young white-collars, seem to agree that the mainland edition is a far cry from the HK original.”

…which keeps reminding me that Hong Kong and Mainland China are two very different playing-grounds.

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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