As if to make one last-ditch attempt to remind us that it's still around, MySpace China has laid off two thirds of its staff, leaving about 15 employees left to swat flies. Worldwide, the sinking ship that is MySpace is laying off 500 people today. CEO Wei Lai (魏来) has also resigned, but no news if Wendi Deng (aka Mrs Rupert Murdoch) is still around as Chief of Strategy. But really, who cares? China Music Radar hits the nail on the head, "Did Myspace make any impact at all in China? Not in our experience. We never used it; we never encountered an artist that did. Since October, the site has been completely unusable here in China." Ouch. more ›

• Rumor: MySpace to Close China Doors [JLM Pacific Epoch] "Recent rumors have said MySpace China may close down and withdraw from the Chinese market, reports DoNews. Unnamed sources said on Thursday that MySpace China may undergo major restructuring in the near future and adopt media as its new orientation."
• 'Reactionary' Ringtones Spark Arrests In Tibet [NPR] "Police in Tibet have swept markets in recent months looking for banned music. Chinese state media report that police have arrested several suspects for allegedly downloading to their cell phones music that the government considers 'reactionary.'"
• How much are those bronze heads really worth? [Danwei] "I have been studying China's old palace architecture for over 70 years. I think that two out of so many parts of the palace's enormous structure, the zodiac animal heads from the Old Summer Palace don't have much value in themselves. There is nothing remarkable about their cost or craftsmanship. They were just water faucets, and very coarse compared with other artifacts from the Old Summer Palace kept at Peking University and other places. These days, they can be easily manufactured at small factories in Beijing or Guangzhou. The artistic value is just not very high."

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies (though one wonders how they would do it with a name like that because "校内“ literally means "in school"). more ›

So both Myspace and Friendster have their own China versions. Now Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy Digital China Watch points us to a report on China Business News (第一财经日报) which cites an “industry insider” who says that Facebook plans to release additional language interfaces and intends to enter the China market as early as December this year. The paper also claims that "Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site like MySpace has done with MySpace.cn, but will instead acquire an existing SNS in China." more ›

Thanks to a tip from vadaga, Shanghaiist learned that now you only have one option to login to your existing MySpace 麦斯贝 account page in mainland China - use of an anonymising proxy. more ›

So both of these links work: more ›