Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Chinese Social Networks

 TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 5 -- Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300m Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers. China’s leading social network Qzone, which is targeted at teenagers, may be the largest in the world. Tencent, the company that runs Qzone, recently announced group revenues of over $1 billion in 2008. 51.com, which targets working class adults from rural parts of China, is the second most popular social network in China with 130M registered users. Chinese students flock to Xiaonei with approx. 40m users. Open Social Networks are Not So Open in China. Today, only one of the top 50 apps in China’s social networks runs on OpenSocial. When Xiaonei and 51.com at first opened their own platforms, their terms of services outraged the developer community with clauses that practically blocked all monetization opportunities and a shared user base with their own websites. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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5 International SN To Keep An Eye On

CNET NEWS -- Dec 18 -- It's a big world out there and Facebook and MySpace don't own it.

China: Xiaonei
Xiaonei is basically a Chinese Facebook clone.

France: Skyrock
Skyrock started as a blog in 2002, which was eventually abandoned in 2007 and turned into a social network. It was the right move.

Germany: StudiVZ
StudiVZ is, well, an almost exact replica of Facebook, but without the company's signature blue design.

Japan: Mixi
Mixi controls almost every aspect of the member's profile design and structure and it doesn't even let third-party developers deploy apps on the site.

South Korea: Cyworld
Cyworld recently launched a U.S. site in an attempt to expand globally and take Facebook and MySpace on directly.
FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Lufthansa Joins Xiaonei

BNET -- Dec 10 -- Lufthansa has recently launched a group on the "Facebook of China," Xiaonei. Lufthansa is positioning itselves as a travel facilitator, putting like minded students in touch with each other, providing them with visa and country information, offering constantly updated advice from other students currently studying in Europe, offer links to relevant sites. FULL ARTICLE @ BNET

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Chinese SN Block Baidu Indexing

CNET NEWS -- Sep 14 -- User privacy concerns on Chinese social networks have led the biggest players to block indexing by Baidu, China's leading search engine. The blogging site of Sohu.com, China's leading portal, as well as social networks including 51.com, Xiaonei, and Hainei have blocked Baidu's spiders from indexing the sites, Marbridge reported. Other search engines may also be blocked. The reasoning behind this move may reveal a pragmatic commitment to security by obscurity for people who post under their real names and may want to avoid attention from employers, acquaintances, and government monitors. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Xiaonei.com Launches Open Platform

CENTRE DAILY -- July 8 -- Xiaonei.com, China's largest social networking website, launched its Open Platform program that will allow third-party developers to provide applications to the more than 22 million Xiaonei.com users. The Xiaonei.com Open Platform has already attracted approximately 30 different types of APPs. FULL ARTICLE @ CENTRE DAILY

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Xiaonei

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Facebook's Foreign Clones

FORBES -- June 12 -- If users aren't satisfied to merely create a Facebook profile, Agriya Infospace, based in Chennai, India, offers another option: Create your own Facebook. Agriya sells what it calls "Kootali," a $400 software package that lets developers replicate Facebook's design and features, complete with friend networks, photos and "mini-feeds"--even Facebook's font. Their customers, mostly unknown sites like Faceclub.com and Umicity.com, don't pose much of a competitive threat to Facebook. But, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Agriya's cloning software represents a more general problem for Facebook: that any skilled developer can recreate the site's basic social networking functions.

Facebook Copycats Abroad
StudiVerzeichnis, German for "Student Index", have gathered around 6m registered users.
VKontakte, is with 4.5m unique visitors a day and 13.3m registered users, the most popular site in Russia
Chinnese Xiaonei claims to have received around 15m unique visitors in April

The copycats' explosive growth comes at a time when Facebook seems to be exploring its own international offshoots but the clones may have already saturated some international markets. In China, Xiaonei has already registered more than 90% of college students. Wang Xing, who created Xiaonei in 2005, admits that the site's design was originally "borrowed" from Facebook. Asked if he feels any compunction about taking features wholesale from Facebook, Wang points to Mark Zuckerberg's own copycat problems. Since 2004, the owners of rival site ConnectU have claimed that Zuckerberg stole intellectual property from their social network while working as a software developer for the site.
FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES

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Facebook

Xiaonei

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Chinese Facebook Clone Xiaonei Raises $430 Million

TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 30 -- Chinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat. As of November 2007, the site was said to be the most popular social networking site among university students in China, with 15m registered users and 8.8m active users. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

 Mark Brooks: That's just insane! The founders must be dancing the jig!

Blatant Facebook Rip-Off Gets Acquired

MASHABLE BLOG -- Oct 24 -- Beijing-based social network for college students, Xiaonei.com (~1million users), was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet consortium. The plan is to merge Xiaonei with 5Q, OPI's own college social network. The two sites now serve 90% of the active online student population. Xiaonei is a one-year old startup founded by Tsinghua university graduate Wang Xing. Even the strategy was a clone of Facebook - Xiaonei focused on the top schools first, realizing that widespread adoption would follow. They received angel funding from investors that included an ex-CTO of Amazon.com. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE BLOG