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.

Why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is the current hype. Some bloggers compare it with Twitter frenzy happened last year. It is a simple (at least today) social message aggregator and definitely it's not the first one (Mashable listed 8 aggregators). I have FriendFeed installed on Facebook and quite enjoy "spying" what my friends are doing, specially I love to follow my sociologist friend's new posts and book reading updates for my research purpose before I become a big fan of Twitter.

So, why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is a continental beacon
Facebook beacon and news feed are most compelling social messaging mechanism. The passive messaging makes social utilities evolved into the third generation of social networks - behavior centric. However, Facebook is an Internet island (note that the island is not a walled garden as Facebook is an open social platform). FriendFeed breaks the island effect through message aggregation. Hence, it is a continental beacon.

As Facebook demonstrated the business model that social messaging will be the key for social ads, which envisioned by many insiders that will potentially surpass Google in the future, FriendFeed indeed raised the attention on how far the social messaging can be reached. Yet another land grabbing!