Economist has a good introduction article to China social networking websites, “Not losing Facebook in China“. It is the first time I’ve ever heard of this China facebook xiaonei.com. If you know facebook and you know Chinese, you can guess that is a China facebook. “xiaonei” is Chinese pinyin which means “in school” while “xiao” means “school”.
YouTube, the video-sharing site that is now part of Google, has over 200 copycats in China, about 10% of them backed by venture capital, says Isaac Mao, an internet investor and a Chinese blogging pioneer.
Not a surprise. China’s popular instant messenger QQ’s idea was from ICQ. It was called at the beginning “OICQ” (O=Oh). Tudou built its success by following YouTube. Wealink gained popularity from duplicating LinkedIn. However, their successes are not built in a day and there were many similar start-ups who failed to make it.
Cultural compatibility is much less of a problem, given the extent to which Chinese society is built on personal connections, or guanxi. Online social-networking is a logical extension of such relationships, says Allison Luong of Pearl Research, an internet consultancy.
Many Chinese online users tend to meet their online friends in real life. Social networks would have no doubt providing another mean for people to make more friends. Besides, as Chinese Internet is still playing around in the entertainment stage. It is important to delivery more fun in a social network to gain huge popularity.
However, forums and discussion boards are extremely important in Chinese Internet users’ life for problem solving, seeking entertainment sources, and having some fun. A social network built on forums and discussion boards would speed up the process of attracting and maintaining users.
How about foreign websites in China? eBay lost its battle to Alibaba’s Taobao; and, Google is still struggling with Baidu. What’s going on in MySpace’s April launch of its Chinese website?
According to compete.com’s figure above, they are doing just fine. There are a lot to explore about China’s social networking websites. Leave in the comment what you are eager to know and I would talk about it later.
1 response so far ↓
1 wing // Mar 31, 2008 at 8:21 pm
they did not count 360Quan.com .
Koolanoo Group is a China Internet and new media leader. The company owns the No. 1 teenage destination online in China, which represents the majority of the 220 million online community in China. Koolanoo Group owns 360Quan.com China’s Leading Social Network for Teens
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