Zing Me

» see me.zing.vn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

zing me was a vietnamese product, in vietnamese, served off a vietnamese game-and-music portal that vng had been building since 2004. the only barrier i could have cleared from ankara was the third one. by 2009 i was twenty-five, on a ttnet adsl line, already on the english-language facebook that had absorbed most of my msn-era friend graph.

vng corporation, founded by le hong minh in 2004 as a game-publishing company, owned the zing brand. zing mp3 sat at the music end of that portal with zing news beside it on the editorial side. in august 2009 the team added zing me as a social-network layer that piped existing zing accounts into friend graphs and photo galleries. honestly. the design was open about being a facebook clone in shape, in roughly the same way orkut was a facebook clone in shape.

the early months were the headline. on 23 september 2009 zing me recorded 945 thousand active users against facebook's 918 thousand vietnamese accounts and held the lead. that lead lasted into 2012. for some reason, the vietnamese press treated it as a national victory at the time, a domestic product winning a category that everywhere else in the world was already gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

in fairness, zing me's growth ran on warm-start traffic from the existing zing music portal, which handed the social product an audience without the cold-start network problem orkut had hit in non-launch markets. browser-based games then kept that audience engaged on the page longer than the news feed alone would have, while the cyber-cafe stack across vietnamese cities pointed straight at zing as the local default.

this happened more in the asean internet than where i was. by 2011 the user count had crossed six million accounts. close enough, the vietnamese press at the time put the platform's monthly engagement around twice the vietnamese portion of facebook. anyway, that translated to actual ad-side interest from vietnamese brands that did not have a facebook page yet.

~ the decline ~

this part you had to be in vietnam for, and i was not. in october 2012 facebook overtook zing me at around 8.5 million vietnamese accounts. either way, vng had already started its own pivot. in december 2012 it launched zalo, an ott messenger that targeted the vietnamese mobile market at the exact moment smartphone adoption was kicking in.

zalo got the engineering attention zing me did not. by 2014 zing me had stopped getting product updates beyond the games layer. for whatever reason, the design language stayed locked in its 2010 shape while the rest of the vietnamese internet moved off browser-based desktop social and onto mobile-native messengers. close enough, the audience drifted to teen accounts and game players who stayed only because their game saves lived there.

~ what got buried with it ~

in january 2020 vng pulled the plug on me.zing.vn. honestly, the parent portal still ran. the social layer did not. visitors to the old address got a system-upgrade notice for a while and then nothing at all. the database itself was deleted rather than archived.

what disappeared was a decade of vietnamese photos, status updates and small-creator pages that had been hosted nowhere else. zalo absorbed the active half of the audience as a messenger. for the lapsed half, the photos went with the database. zing me became the largest single-country social-network shutdown of the post-orkut era that nobody outside vietnam noticed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »