October 27, 2006
 China Web 2.0 has a great post on the current state of social networking sites in China:
With Facebook’s billion-dollar potential acquisition value, campus social networking is also a hot web 2.0 field in China. The history of alumni community in China can be traced back to 1999, when Joseph Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive, and others founded ChinaRen. ChinaRen was acquired by Sohu one year later by Sohu in 2000 September in the cost of Sohu’s 30 million-dollar shares. After acquisition, ChinaRen and 5460, a site of China Telecom Hunan, are still two most popular alumni communities in China, attracting million of users.
But both ChinaRen and 5460 missed the first wave of web 2.0, they have not noticed the change in collegiate community market. When Facebook gradually became hot in US, younger enterpreneurs, like Wang Xing of Xiaonei, realized there are opportunities for them. Wang Xing launched Xiaonei, an obvious copycat of Facebook, in late 2005.
When Facebook got more exposure in Chinese media and blogs, more and more campus networking startups launched to copy its model. “There are still 20 smaller players out there,” Joseph Chen told Red Herring. Here is an incomplete list I collected:
These campus social networks also follow the policy of Facebook to build a walled garden among collegiate students, users have to sign up from IP of campus network or using a valid campus email, and these sites encourage real name registration. Most of them have similar features, such as personal profile page, blogs, adding friends, photo hosting, groups, event sharing and etc. Therefore, they have to face fierce competion from others.
Though Alexa is far from an ideal benchmark to evaluate these social networking sites, because of low penetration rate of alexa toolbar in Chinese college students’ PC, Alexa data can still be useful to compare their relative popularity. From the data (the chart below illustrated the top 5 campus social networks), Zhanzuo, founded in this April and raised funding from Sequoia China in July, and Xiaonei are most popular. It is a little surprising to me that the third place belongs to Yeejee not 5Q. In fact, Yeejee owns the domain name of Xiaonei.net to steal users who mis-spell the domain name of Xianei.com.
However, according to Alexa data, ChinaRen still ranks No. 75 in the world, it enjoys better brand name and broader user base than all its competitors. Will ChinaRen’s Xiaonei change the landscape in this market? Or will Joseph Chen successfully integrated the power of Xiaonei and 5Q to beat ChinaRen?
<!-- technorati tags start --> Technorati Tags: campus, china, chinaren, chinese, facebook, internet, market, xioanei, social networking <!-- technorati tags end -->
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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