Are Chinese social networks falling behind?

Landscape of Chinese social networks:
#1 - 51.com - myspace clone in China
#2 - xiaonei.com (means "inside campus") - facebook clone in China
Catchups: 360quan.com (yet another myspace clone focused on 15-25 demos); heinei.com (yet another facebook clone by the same founder of xiaonei.com after its acquisition); yiqi.com (founded by a high-profile Chinese Internet veteran and made big noise, combined many current social app features copied from US).

Here's Alexa analytics (not quite accurate but there's no reputable data available from comScore or Quantcast for China)


Obviously, the Chinese facebook clone falls behind the myspace clone at this moment. Notice that 51.com has been missing media centric characteristics of myspace (music, film, video distribution).

Interestingly, when we check out the growth of myspace and facebook, the Alexa chart shows the similar trend of the two major social networks in US before 2007. Facebook is way behind myspace before it actively expanded its reach beyond campus and opened its social platform in May 2007.

In the social network evolution phases, Chinese social networks are mostly in the first or second generation based on user adoption. The big question is, given the culture difference, will Chinese social netters evolve into the third generation? If the answer is true, instead of the blooming of facebook clones in China, passive and behavior social messaging such as Twitter and FriendFeed clones in China will take off eventually.

Broken longtail

The longtail theory by Chris Anderson quickly becomes the bible when many web2.0 startups pitching their business models. One common misuse or misunderstanding of longtail is ignoring the cost of creating longtail channel.

The longtail channel is the mechanism to aggregate and distribute longtail items (content, services providers, merchandise, etc). The channel is not simply a web2.0 site. It is about how to move the items in and out of the site. Google, Amazon, Ebay now rely on branding to retain their longtail channels. Building brand is costly huge effort. Yelp aggregates longtail by leveraging users (crowd sourcing) and focusing on San Francisco restaurants initially. Without carefully crafted channel creation strategy, longtail channel will be broken and the longtail model will never work.