Facebook going to China? Not a new market for social networks
Did you know that Facebook has an identical twin in china? It’s called Xiaonei.com, and it looks almost exactly the same (albeit not in English).
David Feng over at Blognation China noted that even if Facebook’s nabbing of the “.cn” domain name — the extension for China — is an indication of their move towards China, Facebook may have a tough time pulling a user-base from the already entrenched social networks:
Sucking away folks from even the “copycat” version of Facebook will be no easy deal. Xiaonei easily has the lion’s share of users (in particular if compared to Chinese users of Facebook), so to get them over to Facebook China (if it does indeed launch) is going to be one big coax. (The Chinese, like the Swiss (as 12 years in Switzerland have no doubt told me), like “local stuff”; they’ll ask themselves why should we switch?.)
Given Facebook’s recent moves towards being international, including the introduction of real foreign-language support in their system, certainly indicates that they want to take a global position. In the US at least, one of the main reasons to be on Facebook is that so many people already are. Will it go so well in China? Who knows.
Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Indeed, Xiaonei does have the market sewn up but my experience is that Facebook attracts usership beyond its original target network:university students.
Xiaonei, which means ‘on campus’ in Chinese, is still aimed at university students only.
The main challenge my come prising users from QQ (ICQ clone)providing a better reason to maintain exisitng relationships online elsewhere.
Given this development, I doubt Facebook will get much traction there. None of the US mega-properties are especially popular in China, including Google, Yahoo, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Blogger etc. The Chinese are very good at seeing what’s happening here and adapting it to their market.
It’s not just the Chinese who do this, but expats in China. Toodou.com, the YouTube of China, was started by a Dutch expat and is run by a Chinese national who worked in the US for several years. Also, they focused more on mobile from the beginning since mobile services are better and more popular there.
hi you did not take into account 360Quan.com that is Officially China’s 2nd Largest Social Network, and the fastest growing website in the history of online China. In addition, it is ranked Largest Friend Finder Website, 8th Largest Community-based Website, and nominated in the overall Top 5 most popular online destinations of China. Owned by Koolanoo Group, the company is launching several new products in 2008, mail, browser and mobile applications. Voted by Baidu Annual Reports as ‘One to watch’ by the industry.
Leave a Comment