Tencent’s Sogou Launches Community-Based Social Product for Trending Topics
Sogou, a Chinese tech firm acquired by Tencent last year, has launched a youthful community-based social product called “Miaogeng,” Tech Planet reported on October 11. On this platform, users can create texts and pictures around trending topics and buzzwords, deploying emojis to express their emotions.
The interface of Miaogeng is divided into “Mood,” “Discovery,” “Creation,” and “Personal Center.” In the Mood section, users can see some expressions in text and corresponding temperatures ranging from -80°C to 80°C – the higher the temperature, the better the mood. On the Discovery page, users can see various emotions posted by other users, and can interact with them.
Users can also carry out secondary creation through buzzwords to express their emotions. The platform provides a wealth of creative material templates to reduce the threshold for creation. Overall, the app is a trendy community suitable for young people to express their feelings and interact with others.
In fact, before Sogou was acquired by Tencent, it attempted to achieve such product innovations. In addition to the input method product, a learning tool called “bingo” was launched, but it was soon taken off shelves. The launch of Miaogeng is regarded as another exploration of Sogou in the social technology field.
Tencent‘s social products have changed focus from personal expression to community interaction. Not long ago, a multi-group chat app named “Q Ciyuan” was launched. It is one of the few community products launched by Tencent in the past two years. It adopts text and voice group chat and pays attention to the chat habits of different users.
In the past two years, Tencent has launched more than 10 personal social products such as video beauty social app “Maohu,” high-quality social app “Qingliao,” and audio-based social app “Echo.” In fact, this market sector is already full of competitors.
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Tencent then began to explore community-based products, such as news outlet Kandian’s community and gaming community product NokNok. It can be seen that Tencent regards this community as a new breakthrough.
Tencent has tried many times, but has never been able to create a hit product that can compete with Douyin and Kuaishou, and has instead extended to overseas markets. Tencent has previously invested in a wide range of companies in the entertainment field, including video player MX Player, the overseas version of QQ Music, Joox, Thai digital content platform Ookbee, local news application NewsDog, and the Indian version of iQiyi.
