2007年11月26日，新华社国际经济部的15个记者，在英国 Financial Times 的martin 带领下，前来叽歪办公室视察指导工作。


工作报告 #4 of 4 - Chicken Born To “Gossip” Another IT Landscape

A Tsinghua science-graduate strives for diamonds from information fractions, whose new micro-blog helps us understand his mission unaccomplished, writes Xinhua-FT Group

A chicken slanting its head gossiping (the logo of Jiwai.de which pronounces in Chinese like chicken slanting and in meaning of gossiping) is just like Li Zhuohuan, a young man who has the enthusiasm to gossip but not a fluent English speaker by talking discontinuously during an English interview class.

Li, casually dressed like a college student welcoming us 15 journalists from Xinhua and our teacher Martin from FT at the entrance of his office, where is nearly empty with only a round of bright orange sofa and a computer desk inside and no decoration, showed us Monday a new concept of a communication model in the e-era.

Li, founder of Jiwai.de, excited about the communication style twitter providing, and thus created Jiwai.de, which he described as a Chinese twitter and a chat room.

The 28-year-old former administrator of Shui Mu Qing Hua (a BBS operated by Tsinghua students) said the great difference between Chinese and the U.S. clients is that many Chinese clients are not good at expressing, which he thinks he himself is also not accomplished in it.

In micro-blog, people could write down their thoughts in pieces wherever they are, instead of writing long articles, otherwise maybe they will forget what has sparked in their mind.

The young founder with already 8 years working experiences said: “In the era of information explosion, information has been fractionized. People are not willing to read long stories. What Jiwai.de would do is to find the essence of these fractionlets, and create value for the reader. ”

Jiwai.de is “not only a micro-blog, but also a new media”, which allows the clients to send and receive messages through QQ, MSN, Gtalk, Skype, Wap and handset to it. “We can get any information through any devices from anyone at any places at anytime.” according to Li.

However, just starting their business on May 20 this year, the 10-staff small company provides services totally free to only tens of thousand of clients, which is obviously not enough to make the company to dig the first barrel of gold.

Despite Li admitted frankly that the company still has no profit, he is confident about the company’s future by saying “if the visitors reached 10,000,000, we will certainly find the model to make money”.

Talking about his competitors, Li pointed out that Fanfou.com (also a company providing similar micro-blog service) has more clients due to the robust promotion, which his company is lack of by showing us the empty first floor of his office which assigned for marketing department with actually no staff working there.

After the interview, Li Zhuohuan, the guy working round the clock, caught on the train to Shanghai, from where he sent out one of his gossips saying “Today is my oral English day talking to Martin for a whole afternoon with sweat streaming down my back”.