//beconfused

Saw the following joke at Mercedes’ World, thought I share with you before I rush for school:

The local news station was interviewing an 80-year-old lady because she had just gotten married - for the fourth time. The interviewer asked her questions about her life, about what it felt like to be marrying again at 80, and then about her new husband’s occupation.

“He’s a funeral director,” she answered.

“Interesting,” the newsman thought. He then asked her if she wouldn’t mind telling him a little about her first three husbands and what they did for a living.

She paused for a few moments, needing time to reflect on all those years. After a short time, a smile came to her face and she answered proudly, explaining that she’d first married a banker when she was in her early 20s, then a circus ringmaster when in her 40s, later on a preacher when in her 60s, and now in her 80s, a funeral director.

The interviewer looked at her, quite astonished, and asked why she had married four men with such diverse careers.

She smiled and explained, “I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go.”

Just yesterday I reviewed a local website Mallr. I went on to talk to Derek regarding Mallr, the future of Mallr and his double-space habits through Windows Live Messenger.

Mallr is one of the few local internet web site. It’s started by Kevin and Derek with Kevin doing most of the dirty work. It’s cool to have more local websites around.

(Screenshot of Mallr.)

The entire chat transcript

Mr. Dew (Dew): So Derek, just who are you?

Derek from Mallr: A person who is passionate about Technology, sleeps, eats, breathes and works with the Internet. I work at a technology firm that feeds me and in my spare time, I work on Mallr with some of my mates.

Dew: And you’re from Singapore?

Derek: You bet

Dew: Care to tell me more about Mallr? How did it begin?

Derek: That’s interesting. Mallr started out as an idea to capture images of shops within Malls so that people can virtually find what a Mall has. We then evolved into a Reviews site mimicking a certain Yelp.com but food reviews site are in abundant and hardly catch on. We wanted to do something fun yet social where people can contribute stuff. In Singapore, media and news are still very much controlled and limited. So we thought if we could help to liberalize this industry by introducing a ranked news site, that will be cool. Apparently, it turned out to be very similar to a much more popular site - Digg. We haven’t turned back since.

Dew: Wow, it certainly has evolved a lot. Yeah, I noticed it looked like Digg.com. One thing I dislike about Digg.com is that it lacks local news. I never knew what’s trendy locally and Mallr would be helpful for me, hahaa… Let’s talk a little about the programming part. How long did you guys take? Who’s involved and who’s just slacking around?

Derek: We’ve pretty much coded for a few months & toying with a lot of CMS by the time we thought of doing a social news site. It really didn’t take a lot of time probably, 2 weeks to get the thing started. There are a few open source reversed-engineered software out there and looking thru the source helped. Kevin did most of the dirty work. We just aren’t design people to make the interface slick.

Dew: Is that a ready-make CMS that you guys used and it’s all created from a scratch?

Derek: We did model ourselves after a CMS but some of the codes, widgets and images were added separately.

Dew: That’s cool and a lot of work involved. I mentioned before that Mallr would need a bigger community to be successful, any plans on how to achieve that?

Derek: Advertising on beconfused.com is definitely one alternative, no kidding on this. We feel that the local community still does not have the initiative to vote/submit stories. Acquiring users is challenging but the biggest challenge is to acquire active users. Personally, I do not believe social networks grow organically so we probably have to ‘reward’ users in some way or another. (more…)