Chinese social network Xiaonei.com was bought out by Oak Pacific in October 2006 and even raised $430 million in May 2008.  The name Xiaonei translated to “in campus” in the Chinese language.  Essentially this limits people to believe that the social network is only limited to college and university students in China.  The name Renren actually means “everyone” in Chinese.

Apparently the name change will open up the possibilities for “everyone” to join.  Similar to Facebook, the service started only intended for college students but gradually opened up for everyone.  Renren is taking the same approach.

Joe Chen of Oak Pacific decided upon the name change and is rumored to be merging the company’s other social networks under the Renren brand.  The other social networks include MOP and Kaixin.com. Renren.com used to be a hot web property in 1999, but it went bankrupt in 2001.  Then Joe Chen bought the domain name in 2005.  Renren was made into a classifieds website in 2006, but then it was shut down again in 2007.

QQ Soft has launched a new service called QQ Xiaoyou.  QQ Xiaoyou is a social network with a demographic targeted towards universities and high school students.  Xiaoyou is the Chinese Pinyin of “Alumni.”  Only QQ.com users are allowed to use the service for now.

QQ Xiaoyou has a similar UI as Facebook and is looking to directly compete with another Chinese Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com.  QQ Xiaoyou requires users to provide real names, real photos, and will strictly verify the information.  QQ Xiaoyou takes 3 days to approve all of you information.  QQ attempted to launch a service called QQ Campus in September 2007, but that did not go so well.  QQ Xiaoyou is expected to be much better.

While QQ.com was preparing their Chinese Facebook clone competitor, Xiaonei borrowed another idea from Facebook recently.  Xiaonei decided to announce that they are create an Open Developer Platform for users to create third party applications.

QQ.com is currently the most popular IM software in China.  QQ is ranked #19 on Alexa and is owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd  (HKG:0700). 

QQ.com is part of pop culture in China as the company also provides games, ringtone downloads, and virtual pets.  QQ.com has 317.9 million active accounts of which 160 million are based in China.  Tencent is based in Shenzhen, China.  Tencent started in 1998, launched the IM software in 1999. had an IPO in 2004, and brought QQ Games to America around October 2007.

Information Source:
[1] Wikipedia: TenCent QQ
[2] China Web2.0 Review: QQ To Compete With Xiaonei.com by Tangos

Xiaonei is a social network that is pretty much an exact replica of Facebook, but is based in China. Interestingly, Xiaonei has raised much more money than Facebook. Facebook’s total investment to date is about $378 million from investors such as Peter Thiel, Li Ka-Shing, Microsoft Corporation, Accel Partners, etc. Xiaonei now has $430 million in funding from several different financial companies.

Xiaonei even uses the exact same feature-related icons to talk about the site’s capabilities.

[Note: I took this screen shot after searching for Xiaonei in Google and using the Translate feature]

Notice the icons on the left? Same color scheme, same features, same everything. I wonder if Facebook will respond in any way to this.

Xiaonei was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in October 2006. If anyone who the parties involved are for the new round of funding for Xiaonei, feel free to comment.

Information Source:
[1] VentureBeat: “Xiaonei, the Facebook of China, raises $430M” better funded than Facebook by Matt Marshall

A Facebook replica website, StudiVZ has been seizing a large marketshare of higher education students from the European market while Facebook is dominating the U.S. market. How similar do they look? Click on the thumbnails below to find out (opens in new window):
Facebook Screenshot:
StudiVZ Screenshot:
And while I’m discussing Facebook replicas, how about I once again mention Xiaonei, a recently acquired Chinese version of Facebook that I’ve profiled from before:
Not only is Ehssan Dariani the founder of StudiVZ, but he’s also a member that likes the movie Zoolander and is a 26 year old student at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland studying economics. Dariani started StudiVZ about a year ago and now the current user base is 950,000. Dariani claims that 15,000 people are signing up with StudiVZ per day compared to Facebook’s 20,000 people signing up per day. Dariani started this company with an initial investment of 5,000 Euros at an Internet coffee shop and now has 50 people working for him.

How fast as StudiVZ grown? In July, 200,000 users had signed up and then doubled in August and then another 100,000 in September. By the end of this month, StudiVZ is expecting 1 million users to be signed up. “We want to keep the page free and support it with unobtrusive forms of advertising,” stated Dariani about future growth. “Right now, we want to concentrate on making things run smoothly, and we’ve got plenty of work on our hands already.”

Dariani is not afraid to admit that StudiVZ is a Facebook replica, but has stated “it was also clear from the get-go that we would strongly distinguish ourselves by other things, that we wanted to be original.” An example of a distinguished feature is called “gruscheln,” which is the equivalent of a Facebook “poke.” And because Dariani is not afraid to admit that his website is based off of Facebook, he gives advice to Germans complaining about finding a job. “Stop whining about having no job, or a bad job — that’s total nonsense. As far as that goes, we can learn a lot from the Americans.”

Since so many people in Europe had signed up for the German version, it appears that Dariani made a spin-off Italian version as well called studiLN. Dariani has had many problems with servers because of conflicts with telecomm companies in the past and hopes to fix these problems as the user base grows.

To display the actual growth rate, I have placed a screenshot of StudiVZ’s Alexa ranking chart from the last 6 months:

Had this been a more original product, I would have been a lot more impressed, but I give Dariani credits. I have seen other MySpace and Facebook replicas that has not seen anywhere near similar growth.

[Source: Spiegel Online]