Interviewing Mister Wong: Social Bookmarking from Germany

Written by Luyi Chen on March 6, 2007
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Mister WongGerman social bookmarking site Mister Wong has opened its Chinese version to limited testers. Their first blog post linked to a welcome video on Youtube. China Web2.0 Review interviewed Björn Hornemann from Mister-Wong.cn project to find out more about their China strategy.

Mister Wong has reached Chinese market as early as last year. For example, Blogsir has blogged it in Nov. 2006. He also linked to a great post by Niall Kennedy, you might want to check it along with reading this interview.

Like most del.icio.us competitors, Mister Wong treats more features as their advantage. For example, their group features supports more collaborative operations than del.icio.us network. Obviously, Mister Wong sees more competition from del.icio.us than from local startups. We have seen lots of local startups emerged in this market. They are not ignorable any more. Some of the advantages to del.icio.us may not apply to these local competitors. See our previous coverage of Baidu Favorite and bunch of other similar services in China.

In an early report by Baidu about tagging adoption of Chinese users, there’re only 2.3% Chinese users are using tags. On one side, this shows promising growth in this market, on the other side, at this point so many similar services are competing on limited user base.

Following is our interview with Björn Hornemann. Thanks, Björn!

What the name of the service, Mister Wong, really means?

Björn: Before we started Mister Wong, we thought on the name “Allista“. But then our founder Kai Tietjen had the sudden impression on “Mister Wong”. Everyone in our Team was happy with that name and when our Designer finished the illustration we were absolutely sure that it was a good idea ;) Mister Wong knows how to organize, is friendly, discreet and polite, and always has a good advice where to find the right information.

Which companies in China do you see as your competitors? How would you describe your distinct advantages?

Björn: del.icio.us is our main competitor. But there are two main advantages: Mister Wong is Chinese-languaged and orientated, del.icio.us only in English and dominated by Americans who have another culture and preferences. Furthermore, we’ve got the better technology and more features for our users.

Do you have any special plans for Chinese market, such as unique features designed for Chinese users or partnership with local companies?

Björn: We’re currently in a “pre-beta” period. We’re testing the service and bring it to excellence for our users in china. We’re very open minded on cooperation with local companies. And we are looking forward to the feedback and inspiration of our Chinese users. The first unique feature, which up to now only comes for the Chinese market is a snapshot of the website presented next to the bookmark of that site.

What’s your point of view in online bookmarking market? Has the market matured or not?

Björn: We believe that the market has a great future because beside the feature of organizing your Bookmarks online and have access to them wherever you are -even on your handy-, it also does a very good job in finding new websites and information.

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3 Responses to “Interviewing Mister Wong: Social Bookmarking from Germany”

  1. dude on March 9th, 2007 3:02 am

    居然可以无视百度收藏和QQ书签，可谓无知者无畏

  2. Everything Is Design » Blog Archive » Missed two articles last week: Chicago, user experience, interaction design, information architecture, usability, Asian American stuff. Mostly. on March 12th, 2007 8:50 pm

    […] Kind of unhappy about the way this article capsule thing is going. Lots of good feedback, but, being manual and all, not convinced this is the best way, considering Digg, Delicious, so on. Since this is XML, there should be a way to strip the nodes and mash them up into a new more useful form. . . if anyone has a better tool out there, holla. And it better not be Mister Wong. Jeez. What were they thinking? Oh never mind. […]

  3. Mister Wong on May 15th, 2007 10:11 pm

    Mister Wong的Beta版本已经完成了测试，现在大家可以随意地在Mister Wong注册了。体验才是最重要的嘛。

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