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Facebook has launched a Japanese version and a Chinese version (the latter announced this week). However, many Facebook clones have been in operation in China for a long time. So whether Facebook has an official presence in China does not really matter for millions of Chinese users. Perhaps you are bored with these China copycat stories. However if we study in depth these Chinese Facebook clones, as we will do in this post, they are more innovative and colorful than meets the eye.
Many of the sites below started out as simple clones, but they have each developed their own identity.
The most well-known Facebook copycat is Xiaonei.com. It was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched. The same layout, same colour scheme and even a very similar logo made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook. Xiaonei was bought by Oak Pacific Interactive, which recently sold its approximately 35% share to Softbank for $430 million.
Of course, it was not only Xiaonei that copied the design of Facebook. The latest development in the Facebook clone market is a new look-a-like called Yiqi.com - created by Wen Xie, former CEO of Yahoo China and a very influential veteran in China's Web. Also check out UCenter, a customizable Facebook clone developed by Comsenz. The lastest stats from Comsenz is that over 50,000 UCenters have been set up, only 3 months after its release.
Similar layouts do not mean these Chinese Facebooks function the same as the real Facebook. Being an online social network for Chinese people, it has to understand the Chinese social culture. Xiaonei released a feature called Market, where you can sell and buy second hand things. The second-hand market is an event almost every student union has to organize at least once every semester in Chinese universities.
UCenter has integrated with Comsenz's other products, such as BBS (bulletin board system) product Discuz!. If you know how popular BBS is in China, you would not be surprised that the number of installations of UCenter soars everyday.
Yiqi is trying to tell users that their real life can be reflected on the online world. In Yiqi, you can find features such as Block, Square, Newspaper etc.
I took screenshots of the top menu and side bar of all these sites. It is very interesting to see that the features on each site are different and have been well localized, which actually reflects the change and evolvement of Chinese Facebooks.
How many social networks should a user register for? If your friends are on new social networks, you will soon be invited and most likely will have to do registrations over and over again. Later you will receive some invites (application invites, event invites, etc) most of which you just are not interested in at all. What's the value of joining so many generic SNS? China too has this problem. Enter the vertical SNS.
Hainei was founded by Xing Wang, who was also the co-founder of Xiaonei. Xiaonei has become a Facebook focusing on the Internet industry vertical. On Hainei, most of the users are linked to the Internet industry, which in this case means it doesn't have an active Female user base.
5GSNS was founded by Keso, the most influential Chinese blogger. It is built on UCenter and is a social network helping users find a job in the IT industry (see screenshot below).
Comsenz's Discuz! BBS platform dominates 70% of the Chinese online forum space. UCenter can be bundled with Discuz!, and together they could become a standard for many Chinese web sites. Whereas the western world Facebook is trying to aggregate all applications into one place, in China many mini Facebooks are distributed and fully controlled by users. I should also mention that UCenter supports Themes, which means that they may end up not being Facebook look-a-likes (see screenshot below).
Debating the copycat model of the Chinese Internet market is getting boring; Facebook's official impact on China is still an interesting question, but there are many more options available to the Chinese social network user. SOHU, the top Chinese portal, partnered with Netvibes for its open blog platform in Oct 2007 [disclosure: Gang Lu works for Netvibes] , a sign of the Chinese Internet embracing the Open concept. The latest news is that several popular local SNSs - including Xiaonei, Hainei, Yiqi - have joined Google OpenSocial. Rumour has it that Sina and QQ are planning their own open platforms too.
Indeed the Open Platform is now one of the hottest topics in China. The question remains though: how will Chinese users respond to open SNSs and will any of the local Chinese social networks go global?
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Gang,
It is quite a coincidence. I am currently writing an essay about LinkedIn entering the Chinese market requested by a friend of mine who is working for LinkedIn. Then suddenly I found your new post at RWW. It is a well brief introduction of social network industry in China and it helps the writing of my essay too.
By the way, how do you think of LinkedIn's willingness of entering the Chinese market? Are there realistic chances for these successful western companies copying their success in the Chinese market?
Yihong
Posted by: Yihong Ding | June 24, 2008 11:37 PM
Very interesting write-up about Chinese social networks. It's excited to see the rapid development of web2.0 in China.
Any news about MySpace in China? - MySpace has a Chinese version too. What is their development in China, compare to these local facebook clones?
HappyTutors.com
~ Connect Tutors with Students & Parents ~
Posted by: HappyTutors.com - Connect Tutors with Students & Parents | June 24, 2008 11:39 PM
Those clones look great too ;)
http://www.duivesteyn.com.au
Posted by: DE | June 25, 2008 12:27 AM
Very interesting!
By the way, there is a russian clone too: http://vkontakte.ru which is quite popular in Russia.
Posted by: Marco | June 25, 2008 12:59 AM
There is also european facebook clone: www.studivz.net which is very popular in western europe.
Posted by: Reza Rawassizadeh | June 25, 2008 1:50 AM
Facebook not only has to understand the Chinese social culture, but also has to understand the Chinese internet market. Tencent also want to enter the SNS market, and It's Success proves that the open platform strategy would be hard in China.
Posted by: WebLeOn | June 25, 2008 2:20 AM
I suppose that Facebook has a small impact in China because there are no Chinese universities and schools in Facebook. The same thing is about Russia, there's a big Facebook clonse - http://vkontakte.ru that has more than 13 million users. The only advantage it has over Facebook is Russian schools and universities. In Facebook there are only about 80 thousand Russian users.
There are not only Russian and Chinese Facebook clones, there also some German, Spanish, Turkish, just because Facebook aren't active enough on the local market, their primary market is still US.
I wrote a blog post about that - http://www.mikeborozdin.com/post/Facebook-Lose-Millions.aspx
Posted by: Mike Borozdin | June 25, 2008 6:10 AM
The Chinese "clones" you mention have an advantage in that they understand the psychological context of Chinese users, which is a fancy way of saying that they already have some idea of how Chinese Internet users think and relate to their products.
Facebook's Chinese team will have to learn and adapt to the Chinese landscape, and this will take time. This gives a natural time and implementation advantage to the local players, who can adapt and change very quickly.
There is a lot of talk about Chinese companies going global, but not enough about what going global means. There are Chinese living all over the world, and many of them use some kind of SNS. Compared to English though, almost all users of Chinese are, well, Chinese.
The fact that English is used more by a truly global world population means that although Chinese numbers are huge, the language has a less wide user base. Ultimately, this affects the meaning of "global".
Posted by: Paul Denlinger | June 25, 2008 7:17 AM
I went to China for a study abroad program last summer, and have kept up with many Chinese friends on it. They love it! If anything they're using it to interact with Americans. We'll see how it all pans out, but for those in China who know English, the English version works just fine.
I even made one for my Taiwanese roommate, that's now our only form of communication and it's working out great. Social media is certainly moving to China.
Posted by: Rachel Sherrell | June 25, 2008 2:12 PM
Very interesting read on china's social networking. Xiaonei has been around for a long time. Ucenter is just a simple product from the creator of discuz, it's not really up to the par to compete with facebook or xiaonei.
Overseas Chinese have created a few facebook/myspace look a like sites, may worth to check out:
ABCLives.com
Posted by: James | June 25, 2008 2:59 PM
我需要翻译！
Posted by: 开州网虫 | June 25, 2008 11:48 PM