Most people by now have experienced Googling a product or visiting a website and then seeing an ad for that product or site on their social media feed. “It’s concerning that there’s so much online spying on customers,” Hang Dinh, co-founder of ExtentWorld, says. “It’s a violation of our privacy, but until now, we haven’t had much choice but to surrender to it. With ExtentWorld, however, social media users finally have that option: they can communicate with each other online and be assured that their private data will, in fact, remain theirs.”
ExtentWorld is a social media platform founded by four computer engineers with PhDs in computer science and engineering. As Hang says, “We came together because we were determined to do better for people. There are so many problems with the big platforms, and we knew that social media users deserved solutions. ExtentWorld is what they have been hoping for.”
Hang’s brother, one of those engineers, originally thought of ExtentWorld. “I was a user of Facebook like many people,” he says. “I liked what it could do. But what I didn’t like was its targeted ads. I didn’t like how I didn’t have control of my information. That’s why I thought of EventWorld: I wanted to keep using social media but in a way that would protect my privacy and the privacy of other people. That’s what everyone should have, don’t you think?”
Hang felt the same way and liked ExtentWorld’s potential, but the scope of the idea made her doubtful at first. “You’re talking thirty full-time software engineers, minimum, to get something like this going,” she says. “And my brother doesn’t think small. He had some really amazing features in mind, which made that number go up quickly.”
Hang knew, however, that ExtentWorld could solve some significant issues. “As a professor, I taught a course on the privacy policies of social media. So, I knew about the privacy concerns, probably more so than the average person. I didn’t like that Facebook tracks your internet browsing history, which to me is basically spying. With all that in mind and my brother’s solution, I came on board.”
Hang’s brother, in the meantime, invented two code-generating tools. This enabled ExtentWorld to be developed by just three developers, and as the engineers worked on the new platform, Hang saw how it was different from sites like Facebook. She especially liked its end-to-end encrypted video calling. She could now connect with her family in Vietnam and Germany without concerns about privacy. “I was sold. Once we launched ExtentWorld in 2020, I finally took the big step and deleted my Facebook account.”
To help her brother’s product realize its full potential, she formed ExtentWorld LLC. “That was definitely a step outside of my comfort zone,” Hang remembers. “I read up on forming and running businesses so that I could step in and run the company while my brother focuses on programming and coding.”
ExtentWorld has many capabilities that differentiate it from other social media platforms. One is that a user has one account with up to eight different profiles: public, private, work, academic, dating, merchant, anonymous, and secret. ExtentWorld also provides a dating service with rules that are designed to maximize the user’s privacy.
Information on ExtentWorld is organized based on locations. Each location, such as a city or a country, has a forum where the users interested in that place can view and post. However, for a location at the national level, ExtentWorld restricts free posts to people with a high reputation score.
These features have led to more investors, who may purchase eShare, which is a pre-IPO ExtentWorld common share. ExtentWorld uses eCoin for all transactions within ExtentWorld; eCoin is virtual currency but not cryptocurrency.
Hang sees a big future for ExtentWorld. “I think the social media landscape will continue to be dominated by big players for a while, but we are gaining traction as more people who are tired of their privacy being violated find out about us. Users are becoming more aware of the issues with mainstream social media and are turning to use for the solution. We already have registered users from 25 countries.”
The most challenging task for ExtentWorld’s creators has been marketing. “We are academic and technical people – we can build a good product, but we are not natural marketers. We have had to learn everything about marketing from zero,” Hang states. “In Vietnamese, we have a saying: ‘Vạn sự khởi đầu nan,’ which means ‘All things are difficult before they are easy.’ Thankfully, because of what we have learned, marketing has been becoming easier.”
Running the company has taken the lives of all four engineers in a new direction. “I don’t think any of us saw this coming,” Hang says. “It has been an adventure. What I like the most is that through ExtentWorld, we are changing how social media is done. It really can be private, which is a win for all of us.”
0
0
