AsianAvenue

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AsianAvenue is an Online Community found on the Internet with over 1.3 Million members. It is a prime example of **narrowcasting** because of their intended Asian audience. This site is geared towards developing and helping the young adult Asian community connect, interact and improve their lives. The site offers many different features for the Asian community to interact and build friendships, business partnerships, or possible romances.

**Personal page, Guestbook, Page log**
This is the starting point for AsianAvenue most commonly referred to as “AA”. The member can style their personal page to suit their needs and how they want to be presented to the community. The guestbook is where other members can leave a statement about anything they want to for their friend to see. The page log feature requires for the member to sign up, however after signing up the member can keep a track of all the members that have visited their personal page.

Community
The community feature is where you can type in the name of a member and find them. This is a great feature because it is the general area to search members and enter a chat room of the member’s choice. Along with meeting other members and making friends, members can also gain AsianAvenue points which are redeemable for AsianAvenue branded products. The more the website is used, the more points one gains.

Dating
AsianAvenue offers a distinct dating service. Their service requires a fee and it allows members to search for other members within a certain jurisdiction according to different factors. For example, physical appearance, habits such as drinking, smoking, dwelling area, and what type of relationship members are looking for are the some of the search parameters.

Professionals
This section is a link to all of the professional career members on AsianAvenue. This section helps up and coming individuals who are looking for some connections in the professional field they are headed towards. This is a great section because it is a magnificent opportunity for the community to help out the struggling members in their careers.

**Careers/Jobs**
This section is more directly related for the member finding specific jobs by using AsianAvenue as a search tool. It offers different tools such as posting a resume, searching for jobs and employers.

Email
This is usually a standard feature for most online communities offering an email service for the members.

IM (Instant Messaging)
This is different from chat because the members can use AsianAvenue as an engine for sending instant private messages between two or more members for quick and easy chatting instead of public chatting.

Quick notes
Quick notes are private notes that a visiting member can leave on a member’s page. These notes are intended with privacy and for quick messages between two members.

Blogs
These are increasingly popular in online communities where members can post a piece of written work about anything and people can add their comments to the piece. This is very similar to blogs found on **Xanga** and **Friendster**. However this blog is different from Xanga because the basis of Xanga is based on the blog system.

Polls/Surveys
These polls are surveys are designed to help the community see how they feel on certain current issues.

Member rewards/points
As an incentive, members can earn points by partaking in certain activities such as partaking in surveys, and by using the many different features on the site mentioned earlier. Members can later redeem these points for prizes when they sufficiently accumulate enough.

AsianAvenue has been around for more than a few years, however because of its **narrowcasting** the member population hasn’t been steadily increasing. It is heavily focused on the Asian population and that itself creates a barrier to the diversity of members. The site has recently undergone a major renovation causing members to lose their personal pages and this also has cost the site some members.

See also: BlackPlanet

=**Works Cited**=

Image courtesy of www.AsianAvenue.com [|www.AsianAvenue.com] [|www.AsianAvenue.com/social] [|www.asianvenue.com/dating] [|www.AsianAvenue.com/jobs] [|www.AsianAvenue.com/home]