Koprol Team Disbanded By Yahoo!, Will Koprol Follow Kronologger’s Fate?

Just after I read Aulia Masna’s article on Daily Social about the plan to relaunch Yahoo! Koprol in May, I was surprised to see Satya Witoelar’s tweet stating that he would post the CVs of “talented experienced ex-Yahoo_ID/Koprol ‘s developers” soon. The list was eventually posted on Satya’s blog, confirming that the whole Koprol’s developers team has been disbanded by Yahoo.

From what I understand, Yahoo! is a sinking ship, and as part of the new CEO Scott Thompson’s strategy to keep the ship afloat, Yahoo! is axing about 2,000 of its staff globally. Yahoo! Indonesia is no exception, and unfortunately Koprol’s development team has been included on the list. It beats me though, on why the whole team had to be disbanded ahead of its planned launch of the supposedly new Koprol 2.0 engine in May.

The big question now is what will be Koprol’s fate. Will the social media platform be closed? As Aulia of Daily Social has pointed out, Koprol has a strong users base in Indonesia, and when the news of possible imminent shutdown has spread out, many of its users voiced out (with special hashtag: #saveKoprol) that the platform should not be closed.

I have to admit that I have not been using Koprol for quite some time. As a location-based social media platform, it is losing out to Foursquare especially for my case here in Singapore. However, Koprol is purely made in Indonesia and by Indonesians, therefore as fellow Indonesians, we should be proud of Koprol.

I met some friends, such as Ryan, Nunil and Ari, through Koprol. I met Leo and Smitty, in person, through a Koprol gathering here in Singapore. KCR, Koprol’s community radio, inspired me to setup Radio Komunitas Twitter Indonesia (RKTI). Therefore, like it or not, I have some fond memories in Koprol.



Let’s ask Yahoo! not to close down Koprol. If Yahoo! doesn’t want to run Koprol anymore, then may be Koprol founders can request to take over back Koprol and keep on running the social media platform outside Yahoo? I’m not too sure on whether it’s possible, since I understand that Yahoo! has spent quite a lot of money to acquire Koprol way back in May 2010.

Please, do not let Koprol follow the fate of Kronologger, another Indonesian-made microblogging platform in the past, which was closed down after being acquired by now-defunct Asia Blogging Network. 

PS. Images courtesy of @candoddi and @chocoz

“Older” Hyperlink on Koprol Mobile

If I’m accessing Koprol via its mobile interface and go to Home, when I click the “Older” hyperlink to see the earlier timeline for the first time (to go to page 2 of the timeline), it’s working properly. But when I click the “older” hyperlink for the second time (to go to page 3 of the timeline), I see very old updates (around 7 days ago) instead of the earlier timeline.

The problem only happens if I use my mobile phone to access the mobile interface. If I use my laptop, I don’t encounter the same problem.

Not too sure why. Is it my mobile phone’s browser issue? I’m using Opera Mobile on my HTC HD2.

Update on 27 June 2010, 10:30hrs SGT: I have performed further troubleshooting last night, upon getting some advice from Daniel Armanto, one of Koprol's bosses. It seems that the problem only happened if I'm using SingTel's 3.5G connection. When I switched to my wi-fi connection at home, I didn't encounter the problem, despite it's connected to the same ISP, SingNet in this case.

Thus, I'm convinced now that the problem is not on Koprol's server nor on my mobile phone's browser, but it's most probably my 3.5G Internet service provider issue. Looks like it's SingTel 3.5G's proxy issue?