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

Chapter 239 The Foundation Is Shaken

Upon seeing the message in a bottle product, Tencent's boss and senior executives immediately felt a deep sense of fear.

The employees usually perform their own duties and don't have a strong sense of the big picture, but the boss can see the core of the problem at a glance.

With a dark expression, he said to the employee in charge of data statistics: "From now on, keep a close eye on the number of messages sent on QQ in each hourly interval, the number of times users search for unfamiliar users and request to add unfamiliar users as friends in each hourly interval, and then compare it with the data of the same day and the same hourly interval in the past, and then give me a table and a perspective chart."

He needs to know how much impact the message in a bottle will have on QQ.

If millions of people are busy throwing and retrieving bottles on Renren.com every day, they naturally won't have enough time to search for and add strangers as friends on QQ.

If the message in a bottle has too much of an impact on QQ, then QQ should immediately follow suit with this product.

Cartoon Show, chat history roaming, and Drift Bottle were all product features first launched by Renren.com. It was a bit of a challenge for QQ to catch up with these three features all at once.

Of course, it was only somewhat strenuous.

To say that I feel embarrassed is simply not true.

Mr. Ma's greatest skill is using close-range attacks. While others call it ICQ, he calls it OICQ. Just from this skill of using close-range attacks, you can see that he is a staunch pragmatist who doesn't care about other people's opinions at all.

The message in a bottle feature became incredibly popular thanks to the attention it received across the internet.

People are becoming enthusiastic about this virtual matchmaking game, which is much more sophisticated and romantic than the QQ game of searching for netizens by region or gender.

Thanks to the ingenious design of having to retrieve one item for every one dropped, the input-output ratio of the entire message in a bottle reaches a perfect 1:1 balance.

Everyone who throws a message in a bottle has a chance to retrieve one, which can then start a wonderful chat.

Of course, Chen Cheng also discovered that some things were not quite what he had originally imagined.

First, there are indeed more male users than female users overall, at a ratio of approximately 53:47. This means that for every 53 men who throw out a message in a bottle, if only bottles belonging to different genders can be retrieved, then six men will not be able to retrieve any.

Secondly, female users are more likely to end a message in a bottle exchange, perhaps because the man's two sentences don't quite resonate with her, and she stops replying.

In this way, the man can only move on from this message in a bottle and continue searching for the next one.

In short, the number of female users is small and their enthusiasm is not as high as that of male users, which will create a certain imbalance.

Therefore, Chen Cheng had no choice but to temporarily add a bunch of props to the technology.

For example, oh dear, it's a pity, this time we found a broken message in a bottle, I wonder whose letter is now lost forever in the sea.

Of course, this is pure nonsense. There's no such thing as a message in a bottle breaking randomly. It's just that we ran out of bottles and had to make do with them temporarily.

Then, Chen Cheng quietly increased the winning rate for male users.

If you can't get enough messages from the opposite sex in a bottle, send them an extra 0.1 campus coins every now and then.

Don't underestimate this 0.1 yuan school coin. Even if you spend money like water on JD.com every day 20 years from now, you'll only get a measly five JD Beans in the lucky draw after each order. If you're unlucky, you'll only get useless junk coupons.

How much are five gold beans? Only five cents.

Therefore, Chen Cheng felt that compared to Dong Ge in this respect, he was already quite generous. Anyway, as long as he could make up for the lack of male users and maintain a balance between men and women in bottle-collecting from a technical and algorithmic perspective, that was enough for Chen Cheng.

Thanks to Chen Cheng's meticulous operational thinking, the popularity of the message in a bottle has almost become another dimension of "Mice Love Rice".

Three days later, the Tencent team looked at the data for QQ over the past three days and felt extremely uneasy.

In the conference room, Mr. Ma, with a dark expression, used a projector to display the data changes over the past three days.

He said angrily, "Since the launch of the Renren (校内) message-in-a-bottle feature, our hourly message volume has dropped by at least 25% compared to the past! And the decline has widened in the last two days. What does this mean? It means that at least 25% to 30% of user-to-user communication has been transferred to Renren! And what's even more frightening is that in the past three days, the number of searches and additions of strangers has plummeted by at least 40%! Users are starting to shift their search for new strangers to Renren's message-in-a-bottle feature. If this continues, they may very well surpass us!"

"In addition, I want to mention a very serious issue. In the past few days, our number of paid members has been declining. At least 30% of users whose memberships are expiring in the past few days have given up on renewing, which will have a very serious impact on our revenue."

The product team leader then raised his hand and said, "Mr. Ma, I don't think we need to be too pessimistic. In my personal analysis, although the message in a bottle model is very novel, creative, and has risen very quickly, it is essentially selling a sense of novelty. If they continue to use this method, users will soon enter a stage of aesthetic fatigue."

Mr. Ma said, "User fatigue is a matter for later. Before they get tired of it, our data is constantly declining. Moreover, you don't know if users will continue to use QQ's function of searching for strangers after they get tired of the 'message in a bottle' feature. You also don't know if the Renren.com team will launch a new product when the 'message in a bottle' feature is declining."

The product manager said, "Mr. Ma, I can't give you a definite answer to your question right now, but I can say for sure that the popularity of the message in a bottle won't last long, probably only a few months. What I mean is, we can't think about what Renren.com should do next. We need to think about what we should do next. Renren.com was able to put us in such a passive position with a message in a bottle. Can we also come up with a new product that can put them in a similar passive position?"

Mr. Ma frowned as he analyzed the other party's point of view, then nodded and said, "You're right. After the failure of the alumni directory, we started to switch from offense to defense. If we continue like this, we will only become more and more passive. We need to find a way to switch from defense to offense."

At this point, he looked around and asked, "What good ideas do you have?"

For a moment, everyone could only look at each other in bewilderment. Lately, they had been like donkeys being led by the nose, and they were exhausted. It was difficult to come up with any truly useful solutions in such a short time.

However, the product manager had an idea. He said, "Mr. Ma, I think it's time for us to bring out the video chat function. I've been analyzing our users' behavior and habits, and I've found that only one-third of each person's friends are targeted users. That is to say, only one-third of them know the other person's QQ number and add them precisely through QQ. The remaining two-thirds are strangers found in the search list based on their own filtering criteria."

"So, my personal, narrow-minded deduction is that these two-thirds of stranger friends are actually the preparatory force for developing online romantic partners."

"Since it's primarily an online relationship, being able to see what the other person looks like becomes extremely important."

“When we were working on the alumni directory, we already launched the photo album feature, and some QQ users have already started using it. If we want to take it to the next level, we must launch a real-time video feature so that everyone can chat intuitively through their webcam, just like on MSN. This will definitely be very attractive to users!”

At this point, the product manager continued excitedly, "My idea is that we will focus on video chat next. We will add a webcam icon to the QQ icon. Whoever has a webcam on their computer will have this icon lit up. When searching for strangers, you can also see who has a webcam. We can even use whether or not someone has a webcam as a special filter!"

Mr. Ma paused thoughtfully for a moment, then said, "Your idea is very good, but the problem now is that we need to find out how widespread the hardware of internet cafe webcams is."

The product manager said, "I believe that software can drive hardware innovation. As game graphics get better and better, the requirements for configuration are getting higher and higher, which will force internet cafes to continuously upgrade their configurations. If we develop video chat functionality, users will have demand for it, which will naturally force internet cafes to purchase webcams on a large scale."

Mr. Ma asked him, "Are there any good solutions to the bandwidth and buffering issues in video chat?"

The product manager said, "I think the core transmission mechanism is definitely P2P, which connects users directly and can greatly reduce our bandwidth pressure. However, given the current network environment in China, we cannot rely entirely on direct P2P connections. If users are geographically far apart or there is excessive latency between different operators, we also need to support server relay. Moreover, sometimes a user's network and firewall may restrict P2P connections, so server relay is also necessary."

"Given these circumstances, I recommend a hybrid transmission approach, prioritizing P2P, using a server as a backup, and then employing a monitoring program to enable intelligent switching."

Mr. Ma said with some concern, “The P2P model is feasible for daily use, but the basic requirement for video chat is to minimize latency and reduce lag. This will greatly reduce the advantages of P2P. At that time, the server relay may have to bear a lot of pressure. If 40% of the hundreds of thousands of people video chat at the same time need to be relayed to the server, the bandwidth cost will be astronomical. Our revenue is declining now. If the cost increases rapidly, the operational pressure will be very high, and it will also make our financial data look very bad. We plan to go public in 04. If the financial situation is affected, the listing date may be greatly delayed, or we may even lose the opportunity…”

At this point, he sighed and said, "I'll think about the video chat thing some more. If it really doesn't work out, we can try to get another round of funding. The emergence of Renren.com has had a huge impact on us..."

Suddenly someone asked, "Mr. Ma, could we acquire Xiaonei.com from a capital perspective?"

(End of this chapter)