Dianping.com HQ

Some remarks:

• They have 1000 employees. Thay plan to have 1800 by the end of the year. I was really surprised when I heard those numbers. Everything in China is scaled up to the limit, this is an internet company but they hire people by the thousands. Labor in China is very cheap, but I do not really understand why do they need so many people. Twitter a couple of years ago were just 25 people and they are still less than 400 today.
• They do not have resources to develop and maintain and Open API for third parties, but they want to have it in the near future.
• They receive 30% of the traffic from mobile devices. They are full focused on mobile because they see the numbers are increasing very fast. They expect to have 70% of traffic from mobile devices by the end of the year. Their Android application comes pre-installed on 70% of branded android phones in China.

Many thanks to the e-business club at CEIBS for organize this visit.

If you create content you want to propagate the new items of your feed as soon as you publish the story. Once in the feed the story cannot be changed because the readers would identify it as a new story. Relevant stories in RSS are associated to the lifetime of the story, the most relevant stories being the latest ones. This is a given feature, but it is also a flaw. The story`s age is only one of the factors that define how important it is. The hype the story creates in form of comments and page hits is equally important. In a newspaper, you don’t have the most recent stories on the front page, but the most relevant stories of the day.

The problem with RSS is that it provides too much information. Unfiltered. Not a problem for a machine, but unmanageable for humans. This is the flaw of RSS. If a human is reading several feeds he will be soon flooded with information. These are two possible solutions:

1. Wherever there is the option to subscribe to an RSS feed you can create a personalized feed, setting a minimum relevancy threshold for the stories. There must be an algorithm to calculate relevancy based on the time since publication and the hype the story created. This is a method to add relevancy to RSS feeds based on the information each site owns.
2. The second option is only applicable for data crunching companies. The relevancy of a story is based on the amount of sources reporting on the topic. This impact factor can be calculated by a third party, which then creates a new feed with the filtered news. People could personalize their impact factor by, for example, assigning individual weights to favored news sources. I guess this is how newspapers will look in the future, as services that merge and filter personalized feeds. Guido told me that Google Reader has an option to “Sort by magic” that does a little bit of this. However it only sorts the articles but does not hide the non relevant stories from the feed.

RSS is the father of Web2.0 and a simple content delivery method that will be with us for long. I think somebody needs to come up with a smart way of automatically filtering feeds. Now the question is, how we will consume the filtered RSS. I bet RSS will have a new life on cellphones and smart TV, but that will be another story.