Competitor of Facebook in China - Xiaonei

History

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Xiaonei was founded in December, 2005, by Xing Wang, who had graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing. It soft-launched in October 2005 and the formally opened for business in December, and had received angel funding from investors that included Amazon.com. Facebook, meanwhile, was founded way back in July 2004. It is the earliest SNS campus community in China. Since the day it had set up, it becomes the most popular campus website by having a monopoly position.

Site features

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The name Xiaonei is Chinese Pinyin (Romanized Chinese) for “on campus”. It is a website that has carried college students’ heavy demand on social and interpersonal contacts. That is an obvious indication that the major target market of Xiaonei is to focus on college and university students, allowing them to create a personal profile page that can then be linked to the accounts of their old and new classmates, and creating a network of interlinked profiles. The most important feature is that it has restricted the university students with a specific college IP address or campus e-mail address to register, thus ensuring the majority of registered users are college students. On this site they can paste on their own pictures, written blog, signatures and messages to other friends. This site encourages users to have registration with their real name, real campus name, and upload real photos, so that make college students experience the fun like a real life.

Press release

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Many young students have mentioned in their own blogs that what a large impact Xiaonei has brought to their lives. “China Youth Daily” reported that, “The rapid growth of SNS campus community has reflected the status quo of desire for current college students groups on the network. Moreover, it has indicated that the attitudes which university students deal with the network are further tend to be mature and rational.”

Competitive advantages

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1. Just like MySpace, Xiaonei allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and CSS at the beginning of foundation, so that makes its blog function more individualized and it has become a strong advantage compared with its competitor—Facebook, which comes overseas, while Facebook only allows plain text.
2. Aimed at the status quo of graduates’ unemployment in China, Xiaonei has provided a value-added service. They had set up a new function that provides college students well-known international businesses contacts, as well as practical working opportunities. According to the statistical results, there are over 130,000 passengers online or offline everyday to participate in this new function and enjoy the experience.
3. Xiaonei.com has the function to filtrate those annoying business advertisements. Although it is still an unsoundness function, this part is in an improving process. It has effectively decreased the impact to users which is brought from harmful advertisements.

Recent Events

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1. Xiaonei.com has been acquired by the Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet consortium. The plan is to merge Xiaonei with 5Q, OPI’s own college social network. Xiaonei has close to a million active users, and together the two sites will have a similar stranglehold on the Chinese college market: they now serve more than 90% of the active online student population. At the end of 2006, OPI had completed the integrity of 5Q campus network and Xiaonei, and officially named it to “Xiaonei”. The domain name is: www.xiaonei.com
2. Currently the site is only open to college and university students, but it has planed to have an expansion into companies and workplaces to have a new target market of white-collar workers.
3. In July 2007, relying on an accurate positioning, Xiaonei became the first SNS campus community for opening access to universities and colleges overseas, including more than 500 universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, and some other countries. Many overseas students has found their old friends through Xiaonei.com, and those students who can not access to Xiaonei from other countries wish to join this group as well.
4. Facebook’s recent moves towards being international, including the introduction of real foreign-language support in their system, certainly indicate that they want to take a global position. However, China is no longer a new market for social networks. Facebook may have a tough time pulling a user-base from the already entrenched social networks.

References

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1. http://www.facebookobserver.com/facebook-networking/xiaoneicom-facebooks-clone-in-chinese/ “Facebook’s Clone in Chinese”
2. www.xiaonei.com
3. “Oak Buys China’s Facebook”, http://www.redherring.com/Home/19364, On 23 October 2006
4. http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/43642214.html?fr=qrl Baidu. Com, quick introduction of Xiaonei (in Simplified Chinese)
5. http://hong-in-babson.blogspot.com/2007/12/entrepreneurship-in-china.html “Entrepreneurship in China”