Internet companies often play the game of 'who has the next big killer application'? Well, 21-year-old Antony Yip truly believes his Web site has just that.
Mr Yip, who last year co-founded myrice.com with former banker Howard Chu, has watched his idea of buying and stitching together Chinese-language Web sites expand to a 34-site enterprise. And now he is surprised to see the use of a small feature - a pop-up window that allows browsers to see other visitors and talk to each other - take off.
Mr Yip said that in the past two months traffic to his corner of the Internet had doubled. Daily page views, a measure of a site's popularity, had soared to 17 million from between eight million and 10 million. In addition, 228 Internet destinations had latched on to myrice.com to take advantage of this feature.
'We call it 'an accidental killer app' because it was done by one of our Web masters, completely on his own,' said Mr Yip, who shares the chief executive role with Mr Chu.
Mr Yip said the Web master was too 'lazy' to write a long program to answer people's questions - instead, he thought users visiting the romance, sports, games, entertainment and news sections could talk to each other.
The company was startled to find that Chinese users did not treat the pop-up window as an annoying intrusion, unlike surfers in the United States.