For a long time it has been said that China is a country of cheap knock-off products, but others may see it more as China's entrepreneurial spirit, providing products at a price that is more affordable for Chinese and Asian markets than their western counterparts. This spirit has been extended to China's Web 2.0 landscape, with numerous clones of the West's most popular websites. Today we'll turn our attention to the two most popular Facebook clones.
The two Facebook clones gaining most traction at the moment are Xiaonei (校内网) and Kaixin001 (开心网). Both these sites were physically designed to look virtually identical to Facebook (or at least to Facebook before it's relatively recent re-design) as you can see from the screen shots below:
While Facebook should be irritated by such blatant copying, it arguably brought it upon itself, by being to slow to launch a Chinese language version. A lack of a Chinese language version (or worse still, often being blocked by the "Great Firewall of China") has been a key reason why such clones have flourished and indeed captured significant market share.
Apart from the two sites' difference in brand/site coloring, they also target slightly different demographics. Much like Facebook originally did, Xiaonei has focused on college students - it's Chinese name 校内网 literally means "In school network". Kaixin001 on the other hand focuses on white-collar workers (and FYI 开心网 means "Be happy network").
Both networks make use of "applications" like Facebook, although they've gone slightly different routes about it - Xiaonei allows third party development, while Kaixin001 keeps it in-house. You can find out more information about their applications at a great article by TechCrunch.
For more background reading on Xiaonei and Kaixin001, browse through posts on China Web 2.0 Review tagged Xiaonei and Kaixin001 respectively.
