Lava-Lava Long Way From Being A Platform

Written by Luyi Chen on June 15, 2007
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lava-lavaToday instant messenger service Lava-Lava announced it’s out of beta, Sina is reporting. It also has a corporate version called GK-Express.

The company behind Lava-Lava is Dianji, which was founded by Wang Zhidong, also founder and former CEO of Sina. It’s reported that Lava-Lava now has 20 million registered users, of which 1 million is active. Lava-Lava is using OEM partnership program to gain market share. The number of its registered users includes those from its OEM partners.

Lava-Lava claims it’s an open platform that every partner can have their own fully customizable version of the IM client. After digging a little deeper, I think it’s not the case.

Customizable version of product doesn’t make you a platform, to say nothing of openness. Currently the customizable version of products are all developed by Lava-Lava, not by partner companies themselves according to any standard interface. At most, there’s an identity binding so that users don’t have to register twice.

There’s not really a clear long tail in IM market, which Lava-Lava is arming to integrate. using group features of a popular IM services is much more reasonable than choosing a separate IM service.

We haven’t found an example of how you can build a service based on Lava-Lava. This is not providing a customized version of IM client as a by-product, but building your core business upon it with the IM infrastructure outsourced. Maybe it’s similar to mobile virtual network operator. MVNO has been there for years, but it cannot be called successful.

We believe there’s requirement for Lava-Lava kind of service, but it’s still not clear how the whole business will work, and this formal launch really doesn’t provide the answer.

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One Response to “Lava-Lava Long Way From Being A Platform”

  1. Topliver on June 15th, 2007 4:27 pm

    Your website is perfect!

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