Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 238 Divine Products
One major drawback of QQ chat is that chat history can only be saved locally.

Although WeChat chat history will theoretically only be stored locally in the future, it is, after all, a mobile application, and users will not switch phones to log in at will, so users will not need cloud storage in most cases.

But QQ is different now. Nowadays, more than 90% of netizens do not use their own personal computers regularly, but switch between internet cafes in different places.

Therefore, only 10% of people who own private computers can save their chat logs locally.

Even so, none of the users could view their previous chat history when switching devices to log in.

Later, QQ saw the business opportunity and launched the chat history roaming function, which was combined with paid membership. Many people subscribed to QQ membership specifically for this function.

But the current Renren.com is different. It not only pioneered chat history roaming, but it also allows roaming to everyone without any barriers. For netizens who like to chat, this is a huge surprise and benefit.

Chen Cheng's plan is to make text browsing free and to enable image browsing for members in the future, thereby widening the functional gap between Renren.com and QQ.

If QQ wants to follow suit with this feature, it will not only have to invest in research and development, but also in additional server costs. Most importantly, it cannot charge for it.

Although Chen Cheng would have to pay extra costs for this, he didn't care at all.

The better you do, the more income opportunities you will have in the future. However, if you keep cutting off QQ's profit channels, it will cause great trouble for your competitors.

With the prompt from the floating window, users quickly learned how to turn the chat history roaming function on or off, either as a whole or individually. Immediately afterwards, another prompt and input box popped up in the floating window: "You can now set a chat history roaming password. Please check carefully and confirm."

The two input boxes below are for: Set Password and Confirm Again.

The user simply enters the password twice, and the process is completed smoothly.

Tencent employees also noticed the updates to Renren.com. When they saw the friend list, chat function, and chat history roaming on Renren.com, everyone had the same feeling: the enemy had begun to counterattack!

Originally, they were like invaders of the internet, looking for a good piece of territory, organizing their forces to conquer it, expanding their territory if they succeeded, and changing their target to try again if they lost.

However, few enemies were able to launch a counterattack on their territory.

UC once launched a surprise attack on QQ when QQ's defenses faltered, but QQ adjusted its strategy in time, withdrew its forces, and thus preserved its foundation.

After that, no one was able to launch an attack on the foundation of QQ.

However, Renren.com's series of new features completely took away all of QQ's functions, and did them even better than QQ.

No one in Tencent's top management could understand how the product manager of Xiaonei.com came up with the idea that chat logs could be stored on the server and made available to users at any time!

The boss, unusually furious in the meeting room, questioned the team members: "What exactly are they trying to do? While the technical difficulty of chat history roaming isn't high, is it really necessary to push themselves so hard?! Although text content doesn't take up much storage space, users constantly loading and requesting data puts considerable pressure on the server's CPU and bandwidth, costing at least a million more a year. The worst part is they launched this feature without charging a fee—isn't that just plain insane?!"

Although he complained, the boss knew very well that Renren.com was not acting irrationally, but was constantly dragging itself into an abyss of increasing costs and reducing efficiency.

The school introduced this feature today, and QQ had no choice but to follow suit.

To keep up, we need to develop new systems and increase server investment.

This not only distracted the R&D team but also increased the company's operating costs.

This means we're being led by the nose by the other party.

The boss was filled with regret at that moment, regretting creating the alumni directory.

When I was creating my alumni directory, I originally wanted to seize the other party's market, but I didn't expect that I would miss that step and the whole rhythm would be completely disrupted.

It's too late to regret it now. All he could say to the team was, "We must develop the chat history roaming function in the shortest possible time. Just like Renren, users should be able to choose to roam the entire chat history or roam specific users. We should also create an independent password to protect user privacy, and we can't charge for it."

The team also felt like they were running around like crazy, busy with the alumni directory, then QQ Show, then QQ Games, and now there's chat history roaming added to the mix.

Although Tencent has reached a considerable scale at present, its internal technical team is still somewhat stretched. A significant portion of the technical staff's energy is spent on daily maintenance, making it difficult for everyone to concentrate on developing new features. As a result, the R&D capacity is limited, and many of the same people are being pulled back and forth. This feeling of being unable to attend to everything at once makes everyone somewhat anxious.

However, no one could do anything about the boss's orders. After all, the situation was different now; Renren.com had begun to directly compete with QQ in instant messaging, creating a sense of urgency. Just when everyone thought the trial was over, the Renren.com page continued to redirect.

At this moment, a new notification pops up on the page: The "Drift Bottle" feature on Renren.com is officially launched. Please click here to open the Drift Bottle page and experience the wonderful fun of drift bottles.

The arrow points to a small label on the top of the friends list, which is a transparent glass bottle.

The user didn't know what the message in a bottle was for, but in order to get the reward of school coins and also to experience this new gameplay, the user moved the mouse and clicked on the message in a bottle.

After clicking, a floating page appears, featuring a cartoonish ocean, beach, and coconut trees against a backdrop of blue sky and white clouds. The waves, coconut trees, and clouds are all dynamic, creating a very soothing effect. Occasionally, small crabs and starfish crawl across the beach, resulting in a cute and cozy overall style.

Because this page is a Flash animation, it takes up relatively a lot of space and bandwidth. Therefore, the website actually started pushing the cache to users in batches as soon as they first became familiar with the friends list. The users who received the page cache data first began to continuously transmit data to other nearby users one-to-one. So when millions of people appeared on this page at the same time, the server bandwidth was not under pressure at all, and users did not feel any lag. Many experienced Internet users were still wondering why this page could be displayed completely without loading.

On the left side of the page, there is a glass bottle icon and a net icon. Then a new prompt pops up: "Try throwing a message in a bottle. It will be retrieved first by someone with a special connection to you, allowing you to establish a wonderful bond with them in the vast sea of ​​people!"

Once you open the message in a bottle, a beautiful letter background will appear, where users can enter what they want to send.

The signature area is left blank above the underline, and there is a friendly reminder next to it: "You can enter a nickname you like here and choose a cartoon avatar you like. When you use the message in a bottle to communicate with friends far away, your nickname will be displayed, but your real name and personal homepage will not be displayed."

This gave users who used their real names to access Renren.com a sense of amusement.

Anonymously sending a message in a bottle and chatting with someone of the opposite sex—in this vast sea of ​​people, it must be a real fate that someone finds my message in a bottle, right?

The early days of the internet were subtle, reserved, secretly passionate, and full of romance and idealism, with everyone adoring the most melodramatic plots and settings.

Nowadays, netizens have a strong belief in fate and enjoy establishing wonderful connections with strangers.

If another ten years pass, when people get tired of this so-called "fate" game, they will all start to become pragmatic. The "Shake" feature on WeChat will gradually be abandoned, and people will start to search for suitable targets directly from the "People Nearby" feature. When the "People Nearby" feature can no longer meet people's straightforward needs, more direct apps like Tantan and Momo will gain a foothold.

The "message in a bottle" feature on Renren.com is the first such product on the Chinese internet, and it has been incredibly appealing to restless young men and women.

Before this, they could only see this romantic scene of finding a strange message in a bottle in various movies. Many netizens had long wanted to imitate the movie scene and throw a message in a bottle with their inner monologue into the sea. However, in reality, the vast majority of netizens have never seen what the sea looks like.

However, the fact that Renren.com has developed such a small game is an unexpected surprise for them.

As a result, many people immediately threw out their first message in a bottle.

The backend system shows that, stimulated by the campus currency, 2.6 million out of 2.8 million online users lost their first message in a bottle.

Immediately afterwards, a prompt appeared on the user's page: "Now, try using the net to retrieve a message in a bottle!"

Almost everyone who lost a message in a bottle used a fishing net to retrieve it.

So, they quickly retrieved the message in a bottle for the first time.

Then, a wonderful life experience began.

The system pops up a timely notification: "You can throw up to ten messages in a bottle each day. Each time you throw one, you can retrieve one bottle. You also have a chance to retrieve a bottle containing a special prize. Try your luck!"

Next, the user received a notification that 1.88 campus coins had been credited to their account, and the onboarding process for this new feature officially came to an end.

As Chen Cheng expected, after the system tutorial ended, almost all users became engrossed in throwing and retrieving messages in bottles, as well as chatting with strangers in the bottles.

By this time, the Tencent team was completely bewildered.

The emergence of the message in a bottle means that Renren.com has immediately tapped into QQ's biggest and most core advantage - social networking with strangers.

Previously, when everyone tried to build an alumni directory, they could comfort themselves by thinking that real-name social networking was a small demand and it didn't matter if it didn't succeed, at least Renren.com couldn't build a non-real-name social networking platform.

But who would have thought that Renren.com would create such a miraculous product perfectly tailored for non-real-name social networking?!
(End of this chapter)