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(VietNamNet Bridge)-With the strong development of smart phones, representatives of social networks all believe that 2012 would witness the shift of social networks moving from web to mobile platform.

A new period of development begins

Vuong Quang Khai, Deputy Director of VNG, the owner of Zing Me, a well known social network in Vietnam, said that the social network in 2011 did not see big changes in comparison with 2010. Zing Me kept leading the market, followed by Facebook and go.vn. Other social networks such as Yume, Tamtay did not make any breakthrough. Meanwhile, Banbe, Ming did not succeed in its efforts to attract users.

“This shows that the market has been developing in stability, and there would not be any big changes in the quantity, while the new stage of development – the development in quality, has begun,” Khai said.

Khai also said that open platform, a new tendency of Vietnamese social networks in 2011, which is also the common tendency of Asian social networks, would continue in 2012. Both Zing Me and go.vn have carried out the open-platform strategy, creating favorable conditions for content partners, ad sale agents to use the technical infrastructures, for people to use the payment tool to do business.

Sharing the same view with Khai, Phan Anh Tuan, Deputy Director of VTC Online said that 2011 witnessed the establishment of many social networks. Local newspapers once noted that social networks “mushroomed after the rain”. However, most of the social networks born in 2011 were just in the trial basis, but they did not make any big achievements.

However, with the tendency of developing on the open platform, social networks’ service providers and telecom service providers would cooperate with each other closely. Therefore, the main tendency seen in 2011 was the cooperation among social networks. Go.vn, for example, cooperated with Zing Me, a social network, with ebay (a e-market), vivo (copyrighted online films) and tamtay (games).

According to Khai, the mobile-based social network market in 2011 saw a considerable progress when, together with WAP version, many other apps with different versions used for different operation systems were born and got improved.

Zing Me, for example, has introduced some versions for the most popular operation systems such as iOS, Android, Symbian. Vietnamese users have also got used to use mobile phones to access to social networks.

At present, about 100,000 people use Zing Me Mobile version every day. Meanwhile, VNG is still investing on new Zing Me versions which aim to serve users better. Besides, it is also cooperating with equipment manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung in a plan to put Zing Me on phone devices or TVs.

However, Tuan said that while in the world, social networks on mobile platform has become popular with some well known names, the social network services on mobile platform in Vietnam remains fledgling.

The strong development of open platform

When asked about the social network development in 2012, Khai said that the open platform, which has begun developing, would see further development in the coming years. Social networks will not only embed the content of other sites in them, but will also bring its interactive features such as comments, chat or online payments to other sites.

Khai also has predicted that the social network market would witness the transfer from the web to mobile platform in 2012, when smart phones are getting more and more popular, with the forecast that 3 million smart phones would be sold in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Tuan thinks that in 2012, social networks would develop with multi-foundations and multi-applications.