What am I doing?
Here's an article writen by daodao, in May 2007. //blush
Mr. Zhuohuan Li
- Founder and Chief Executive Officer, JiWai.de - http://jiwai.de/
Zhuohuan Li is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JiWai.de, the first Chinese brother of twitter: an online service that enables you to broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which JiWai.de users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.
Li, much better known of his net name Zixia in Beijing's IT circle， founded Jiwai.de in May, 2007 --- the 1st Chinese twin of Twitter that is receiving increasing applause from the observers and Jiwai Users.
Zixia holds a degree in mechanism from Tsinghua University.
The 27 year old IT professional began his career in 1999 at Chinaren.com, and later sohu.com, when the first round of internet boom in China started up from ZhongGuanCun. At Chinaren.com, he was responsible for system administration, and developed the log analytic and reporting system for the whole site by himself.
Along with the web2.0 upsurge, Zixia shelved the IT company that he founded and worked as CEO himself for years, and joined the web2.0 website youku.com in late 2005, which is now one of the most successful Chinese clone of Youtube. He built up the technology team and led them to establish the site from scratch.
After one and a half years working as the chief scientist of Youku.com， Zixia noticed the growing up of Twitter, which inspired him to found Jiwai.de.
Imitating some of the features of Twitter, Zixia said, he and his team have also committed themselves in localization of Twitter's Chinese brother, and also creating new qualities of its own.
Jiwai in Chinese means exactly the meaning of Twitter. The reason for this Chinese website to choose a ".de" web address is that "de" in Chinese is a particle making "jiwai" an adjective. And thus the personal webpage for each user would be jiwai.de/username, indicating the person is "jiwai"ing.
Some of the IT observers noticed that Jiwai.de has opened up its API since its launch day. This is also the 1st Chinese website that opens up API to the users.
Just like twitter, Jiwai supports updating through sms and gtalk. Updating from mobile phones onto jiwai.de, however, compared with Twitter, saves considerable money for Chinese users who want to use twitter-like stuff.
To meet the demand of more Chinese users, Jiwai.de also supports updating from some other IMs, including MSN, skype, and QQ, which is perhaps the most popular IM in China.
Jiwai is not only the 1st Chinese twitter imitator that enables updating from QQ, but also the first one to supply widget, which makes it possible for Jiwai to combine or cooperate with blogs.
Famous Chinese IT critic KESO said that among all the Chinese imitators of twitter, Jiwai.de is the only one that owns not only the brain of twitter, but also its soul.
From Youku.com to Jiwai.de , that is, from the video-sharing website to the free charge mobile mini-blog, Zixia(Zhuohuan Li) has devoted himself to the tides of web2.0. And obviously, he is a brave wave rider.