If someone could find something equally or even more intense, just imagine the success. As the CEO of Asian Avenue, the first of what he hopes will be a network of ethnic online communities, Sun is banking on the answer. And he's not the only one pioneering what might be called the Ethnet. This trend is a fallout of the burgeoning Soylent fever, triggered lately by the shadowing eclipse of AOL and the shattering IPOs of homepage hosting sites like The Globe and Tripod. Ethnic communities, as Sun observed, are inherently niche.
Problem is, they're also inherently loaded.
As with most online communities, here surfers would log on for free and check off interests and data that would be used to help identify them to others on the service. Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, and so on. No sooner had the site launched than Sun got flamed. Being sensitive is the number one issue. It was a story learned the hard way by another Asian American site, Channel A. Co-founded in San Francisco in 1996 by Steve Chin, a former journalist, and businesswoman Peggy Liu, Channel A was one of the first Ethnet communities to make a splash.