[Sigia-l] Google introduces animated icons on home page

[Faith Peterson]

New list member here - can you stand one more comment on Google Asia? Our UI
developer is from Korea and offers the following observations. The first
adds context to the "bubble" discussion while the second adds another
perspective. I'm forwarding with Young's permission.

"Yes, asian sites are really busy. This is the equivalent of msn in korea (*
**http://www.daum.net/*<https://owa.schawk.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.daum.net/>)
they're usually the twice the length of western sites.

It's intersting to know how they got this way.

1. In Asia, everyone wants to know about everybody and everything. If
something happens to someone somewhere, everyone, I mean everyone knows
about it just about all at the same time. If Snapple introduces some drink
targeted at teenagers, your grandma will find out about it the next day. 50
somethings will sing along to teen-rap artist who debuted 2 hours ago...

The big factor is everyone lives in extremely close proximity to everyone
else. If you live anywhere that's not a farm one cannot walk a single block
without rubbing or bumping into people or trying to dodge cars. You see a
lot, talk a lot along the way and news travel extremly fast. So it's their
nature to be nosy about everything.

Therefore they expect a LOT of links on their sites.

2. Traditionally, individualism is not well respected. You get what everyone
else gets. If you order a hot dog in Korea, they don't ask you what you want
on it. You eat what they give you. This culture eventually trained people to
think if something is commercially available, that's probably the way it
should be. So people are used to having things picked out for them. They
don't like to choose, search, or pick out things themselves only because
they're not used to doing it.

So users expect a piece of news, topics, or whatever that's interesting (or
something that someone thinks that you shopuld be ) picked out for them.

Ultimately, users "think" if a piece of article or news is picked out for
them, then it must be better than or more reputable than the one "I"
searched.

It's a very whacky mentality…
In gerenral, in western cultures, we go out and search for information ON
the internet. In Asia, they expect the internet to bring everything TO them.

I think having a communist or semi-close-to-communism historical background
must have something to do with it… not sure. Just my $0.02

So all the clutter may not be the way to merely take advantage of the
excessive broadband…(korea, the fastest internet in the world! ) but the
broadband just luckily, happened to be there to support it."

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Faith Peterson
Schaumburg, IL, USA
f.a.peterson at gmail.com