The recent 24 hours of Flickr international party reinforced my thoughts that most people in Hong Kong are still new to a lot of the web services that are out there. So when Flickr used their Upcoming service for theFlickr International launch party, most local users probably got their first glance at the event sharing community.

In fact, looking through the users, of the 90 people who signed up (as of this writing), 74 of them signed up this month of August alone, with the Flickr Hong Kong launch party being their only event. That’s around 80% (of local Flickr members) who are unaware of what Upcoming is or have never found a need to use it. Even some of the Y! HK team were new to their own service, very surprising, since I thought most of them bleed purple.

Of course, these aren’t exactly figures you can take to the bank, but I think it’s still accurate to assume the market still find other means (phone, IM) of organizing to be more convenient than using the web, except for Facebook, which is fast becoming a do-everything service for people here.

Upcoming is one Yahoo! service that hasn’t caught on here, an exception to what I said in the Top Web Apps in HK article at R/WW about people here are more likely to use service with brand recognition. It’s pretty safe to say that this is a one time thing and we probably won’t see too many local users continue to use the service after the Flickr event.

Possible related posts:

• Flickr tour hits Hong Kong
• Getogeto - Organize your next gathering
• Barcamp Hong Kong 2008, This Saturday Sept. 06
• Flickr meets Hong Kong
• Office 2.0 Conference 2007