Year 2008 is approaching the end and thus it would be inconclusive not to mention, in what I believe, the best web initiative in Malaysia for this year.

YouthSays

YouthSays, one of the YouthMalaysia project, is undoubtedly the hottest online youth community in Malaysia now. It is open to any Malaysian age 35 and below, and claims to have more than 60,000 members at the time of writing. Quite an impressive feat given that YouthSays is only about 7 months old.



Crowd pulling factor? YouthSays is well publicized, being helped by the fact that it rewards members in cold hard cash. Members can earn money by answering surveys or inviting friends. It might be just peanuts, but it is still attractive enough for non-blogger netizens who might not have the experience (and thrill) of earning cash online.

You might be thinking, what's so great about that? Here comes the CIA, ooops TYI I mean...

The Youth Intelligence (TYI)



If you have given this a thought, it is not hard to guess what is the Holy Grail of this particular project. Yes, the precious data of demographics, interests and opinions of youth in Malaysia, which is certainly useful and attractive for advertising and research companies.

But, how far is this youth project from critical mass? Is 60,000 enough, or 6 million? According to MCMC, there are estimated 65.9% of internet users who are below 35 years old, a whopping 9.8 million!


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Who are behind this?

The founders are certainly "youth" as well, and I don't think anyone else in Malaysia can do this better than Khailee Ng and Joel Neoh.

Talking about youth...

This is something out of topic, but it is worth applauding these 3 young men for completing Google's Summer of Code (SoC) project recently.


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Find out more about their work here:
Phua Khai Fong - http://code.google.com/soc/2008/squeak/about.html
Devtar - http://code.google.com/soc/2008/umit/about.html
Raj Kissu Rajendran - http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mysql/about.html

And, guess what? Devtar might be joining Google soon, just like this guy.