Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

I was a bit apprehensive when Wee Kiat approached me for assistance to acquire additional resources, and a new domain name.

“Yesterday“, he wanted to call this new project.

I had thought that it sounded too antonymical to a certain Singaporean news aggregator, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going to happen next.

After dashing off the domain set up request to DreamHost, I set up the required MySQL settings (some geeky words to throw you non-geeky people off), and shot off the reply.

Needless to say, the rest is history.

Now that Yesterday’s has been set up, there remains the question hanging on its birth: will it survive the stormy seas of the ever turbulent Internet? There was also the problem of competition from the incumbent of all aggregators in Singapore: Tomorrow.Sg, and the possible negative interest by the local media, including the similarly thematically named “Today”.

Perhaps some prophet might predict a new storm brewing in the Singapore blogosphere, with the new entrant’s completing of the aggregator “trinity”. Will Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday’s fight it out, or will it spell the start of a new era on Internet information aggregation? Am I even asking too much questions here, or is being rhetorical all the vogue?

A Digg-based local content vertical collecting engine had existed; the predecessor of Yesterday’s, Click.Sg, is currently defunct. Goodness knows what happened to it, since I had not even heard of it until someone mentioned its demise straight after the founding of Yesterday’s.

What we know is that Singapore, being a country with a paltry number of savvy Internet users whom bother to participate in social networking (other than obsessing about the head count in one’s Friendster profile), it is tough achieving a critical mass of active population to sustain the engine.

It becomes trying when you see that a certain percentage of posts in the aggregator are irrelevant to Singapore, and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. And coming at the heels of Internet experts’ recommendation to specialise, this could score a nagging anchor for a new website that is trying to fly.

As it lies, the current postings all come from Wee Kiat (the founder), and some of his friends. Whether this pilot will catch the fuel and burn will totally depend upon the response of Singapore Netizens.

Filed under: General