Pantip.com upgrades to social-medium status

Thailand’s 15-year-old webboard service provider Pantip.com is planning to rebrand its service as ‘Pantip 3G’, and will offer expanded services with enhancement of user experience before next year.

This move will ‘reconstruct’ the existing Web-architecture infrastructure of Pantip.com, which has been in use for a decade and a half, allowing Pantip.com to provide many more services to its members, as well as to advertisers, and to give its users a more exciting experience.

 

Pantip.com’s chief executive and founder Wanchat Padungrat said that his organisation’s services were now being limited by ageing technology, and it was time to move forwards to enhance its members’ experience with more innovative services driven by new programming technology.

 

“Our existing technology infrastructure, in which we invested 15 years ago, has locked us into an inability to create and roll out new kinds of services beyond our current webboard services. We can enhance our webboard services to be friendlier and more powerful, as well as attracting more users’ engagement and involving more ‘social-media-ism’ if we reconstruct our technology infrastructure. We are doing that now,” Wanchat said.

 

Pantip 3G’s project leader Apisilp Trunganont, who has been one of Pantip’s key men for the past 15 years, said that Pantip 3G was a big step for the company as it would integrate the existing strengths of Pantip.com, including the popularity and loyalty of large groups of people, with new innovative features, including social-network plugins and an embedded “social-network feel and features” inside the webboard.

 

“Pantip 3G is a rebranding of our logo, user’s experience and feelings when it comes to our new services, self-moderation measures, users profile, and so on. One key new feature we will add is ranking the top ‘like’ – or the webboard’s favourite issue – similar to Twitter’s influencer ranking. But we will still keep our chronological ranking as well,” Apisilp said.

 

Currently, Pantip.com has 600,000 registered members and also has 600,000 visitors per day according to Google Analytic.

 

With Pantip 3G’s new features, members will be able to produce more powerful rich content on their posts. with embedded videos, slides, e-books, maps and so on, instead of simply text and still photos. They will be able to enjoy more multimedia content.

 

“We will integrate all the Internet services that are today’s favourites and use them on Pantip.com to give our members a more enjoyable time on our site as well as preferring to share their posts through other social networks like Facebook and Twitter,” Apisilp said.

 

The new features are expected to enable the identification of which post on Pantip is the favourite and most shared. This in turn will encourage members to create better and more attractive content that will help to build a quality image for Pantip.com’s online community.

 

He said it was the right time for Pantip.com to adjust its technology infrastructure. The existing platform is no longer performing well and does not support the rapid growth of Pantip.com into the era of booming social networks.

 

Apisilp said it was his personal passion to develop Pantip.com to become a famous social network at the front of the minds of Thailand’s online community, rather than there being only Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

 

“To be a favourite online service in people’s minds requires a lot of online services that people enjoy, but our existing infrastructure was unable to help Pantip.com to have impressive services like that. It is time to change,” Apisilp said, adding that he hoped the coming change would help the company to grow rapidly once more in the era of social media.

 

Pantip.com plans to hold on to the strong feelings generated by it being the country’s favourite webboard for 15 years, and will blend this characteristic into the new perspective of Pantip 3G, Wanchat said.

 

This move will not only “re-engine” Pantip.com to help it to move forward quickly, but will also help Pantip.com to become the most popular local community or social website with its spotlight on Thai interests.

 

To help Pantip 3G gain a more powerful social network and community engagement, it needs to invest heavily in storage. The company plans to double its storage capacity.

 

Pantip 3G is also expected to attract more advertisers, in terms of conventional advertising and social engagements. The new Pantip.com will standardize its advertising services, breaking away from the current multiplicity of sizes and types of ads in many sessions of webpages to offer only two standard sizes across the website.

 

It will also adjust the advertisement types from being ‘fixed cost’ and ‘cost per IP’ (Internet protocol) to be CPM advertisements. CPM is short for cost per 1,000 impressions.

 

The company also plans to offer dedicated design services for advertisers. It will not only monitor posts that mention the brands throughout the webboard, but will also provide immediate response or feedback to those posts. It will also provide tools for advertisers to better manage their brands within Pantip.com’s social community.

 

Moreover, many these new features will be accessible more easily via smart phones and tablets, with a new service called Mobile Web.

 

“Mobile web is the light version of Pantip.com that will facilitate faster access to the Web on smart phones or tablets. Now, when we get the link of any posts at Pantip.com that are shared on social media – Facebook or Twitter – we need to click the link to access the post, and that takes longer to reach the post because our Web infrastructure is not designed to dedicatedly support access from mobile devices,” Apisilp said.

 

The company is also planning to launch a Pantip.com app for smart phones and tablets across all mobile platforms, but it will start with iOS. This will aim to enable users to keep posting and sharing their posts on the webboard with greater ease and more convenience.

 

The reconstruction of Pantip.com is confidently expected to accelerate Pantip.com into the new online community in which people are spending much more time on the Internet. It is hoping to become a certain online destination for all members of the online community, no matter whether they use PCs, tablets or smart phones.