Results tagged “socialnetworking”

360 million officially all up in China's massively restricted WWW

The number of China's Internet users have reached 360 million, says ChinaTechNews - a pretty darn sizable market that has attracted considerable attention (and you know, a thousand internet-addiction camp proprietors).

Chinese Youth are big ol' interNERDS

According to a presentation by MTV about youth and social networking in Asia, China is the only country where people actually have more ONLINE friends than offline friends. We guess that's not so surprising coming from the Land of 1,000 Internet Addiction Camps, but it still makes us want to go all Ogre on these kids. NERDS!!

More on the China-created Twitter "Fail Whale"

One year on and suddenly, Lu Yiying, the Shanghai-born, Australia-based creator of Twitter's fail whale, is suddenly getting a sudden media reemergence. Besides an audio interview with the BBC, she was also featured in a more in-depth piece by digital design site vectortuts+.

Today's Links: Alibaba starts social networking, Kadeer's kids start complaining, and Algerians start clashing

  • China's Alibaba Adds Social Networking to E-commerce [PC World] "China's Alibaba Group has started mixing social-networking functions into its leading e-commerce platforms, a move it hopes will convince users to spend more time and money on Alibaba Web sites. Alibaba is crafting social-networking platforms specifically to complement two of its core operations. The beta version of a Web site with Facebook-style applications and a Twitter-style feed is being grafted onto Taobao.com."
  • China, the world's factory--a photo tour [CNET Asia Blogs: The Tech Dynasty] "These images are from WethicA, a company that audits factories with an eye toward child labor, workers rights, health & safety, and wages. From the WethicA newsletter: "We are posting real untouched photos of factory working conditions from about one year ago. We have decided this summer to show you an important part of the job we do during audits by telling you why these pictures have been taken. Actually, an audit is much more investigative than ticking boxes off a questionaire. One has to walk in with an open mind ready to question everything in these situations and not only ask a list of predefined questions.""
  • China's turning children against me: Kadeer [ABC News] "The children of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer have gone on Chinese television criticising their mother. Two of Ms Kadeer's children and her brother were at first reported as having written letters blaming their mother for orchestrating recent violence in far western China. Now the two children, along with another son, have recorded interviews with Chinese television for a special program."

Neocha webzine 'Blow Up 5' shows off Shanghai creative types' homes

Neocha, a social networking site dedicated to 'connecting China's creative communites', has just released the fifth edition of their webzine Blow Up. The 'zine, a flash-enabled interactive venture, operates under only one tenet: that the webzine can only be composed of "100% original creative works put together specifically for Blow Up".

Adding to the list of Chinese social networking service providers like Xiaonei and Tencent, kaixin001.com (开心网) has confirmed to have secured USD4-5million in venture capital today from Northern Light Venture Capital headed by Feng Deng, one of the top 10 Chinese venture capitalists in 2007. Launched in April this year, the SNS that is still a private beta already boasts over 20 million active users. Rick Martin (@pandapassport) reports on CNET that the Chinese Facebook clone includes features such as a photo uploading, blogging & micro-blogging platform, music sharing and 1GB online storage space.

Thanks to Twitter’s perpetual failures, Lu’s Fail Whale now features on t-shirts and coffee mugs while other artists create kinetic Fail Whale sculptures.

Since Monday, we've been having problems accessing Facebook here and thought we were the only ones having that problem. Tuesday, we began to hear from friends of ours all around China complaining of the same problem, on the Shanghaiist Contribute page and among the China Twitterati. And then this piece by the WSJ's China Journal appeared, devoting five full paragraphs to Facebook's mysterious outtage. God forbid the day when we have to turn on our VPN just to throw a vampire at a friend, or smuggle liquor on Mob Wars!

Just as the rest of the world is getting swept away in a social networking frenzy, googling for keywords such as "Badoo", "Facebook", "Ebuddy", "Hi5" and even "Second Life", Chinese googlers it seems are a completely different species. In 2007, four out of the top ten keywords among Chinese googlers were wealth-related, searching for keywords such as "stock", "China Merchants Bank", "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China" and "China Construction Bank". Bank of China is conspicuously absent from the list!

Scene from HiPiHi.com from Torley.

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").

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."

We had a good laugh when we saw this "patriotic" banner by Chinese blogger Xiucai ("秀才") which reads: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. Xiucai is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features." [h/t to Rebecca Mackinnon]



  • "If you can’t find a taxi driver whose political views match those of your readers, then just make one up. Call him Mr. Wang, inform your public that he only earns a hundred dollars a month, and they’ll believe any old crap you write."




  • "Focus instead on the fact that every time Jay Yang has taken charge of Yahoo!'s China strategy in the past, the results have been, well, considerably less than stellar."




  • "The meeting, chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, decided to cover all needy people in rural areas across the country under the allowance program, including the aged, the disabled and those who are unable to work."




  • "With visions of the New York Stock Exchange dancing in our heads, many of us expected the Shanghai exchange to be an exciting place to visit and observe live trading. But when we were shown into the large on-site trading room ... it was eerily silent."




  • "In one of the most notable trade deals of the Bush administration, U.S. airlines got the OK Wednesday to ramp up service to China in unprecedented levels... The number of daily passenger flights between the US and China will more than double by 2012."




  • "News Corporation's Chinese version of its social networking site (SNS) MySpace China (Myspace.cn) recently spent one million Yuan to sign the Back Dorm Boys as spokesmen for the website, reports Donews quoting a rumor."




  • "Asian markets were marginally in red today morning led by China's Shanghai index following a warning from the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan that the gains in the Chinese market were unsustainable."




  • "Chinese portal Sina.com, which has one of the "good," officially sanctioned video clip websites, is now holding a massive video blog 播客 contest which will end on July 15th."




  • "Shanghai's international motor racing circuit said yesterday that it will open the track for the first time to private cars for free on June 9 and June 10. But the test driving will be limited to Volkswagen sedan owners."




  • "Asia's tallest clock tower will fall silent from June 1 while it undergoes a four-month renovation program, the first comprehensive face-lift it has had since it first began to chime eight decades ago." Custom's House.




  • "The car ... caught the attention of police when it was doing 186 km per hour on the expressway at 10am. When it passed a charge window at the Nanxun exit in Zhejiang Province, data showed the car spent only 19 min to cover 84 km."


  • For more del.icio.us links, visit the Shanghaiist Contribute page, which is updated throughout the day.

    Photo by jules_shanghai found via the Shanghaiist Contribute page.



  • Started in 2005, the new project is slated for completion in 2009 and will account for for approximately 30% of Chongqing's total installed capacity.




  • This happened on the 19th, around 12pm. The train stopped in the middle of the tunnel, and then began to slowly move again, only to stop and start a few more times.




  • "Wouldn't it be simpler just to leave advertising out of elevators? Fewer bureaucratic headaches, and we'd all be 6 to 8 degrees cooler."




  • "I mean, how many different ways can Jack Bauer save the Republic from terrorists in 24 hours? Well, one way is to have China, the rising superpower, play a sinister role in this season’s back story."




  • "These government officials believe in fengshui, gods and ghosts, but not Marxism-Leninism."




  • "Shanghai Xingbake Cafe Corp. has changed its name to 'Fangyun,' the official Xinhua News Agency said Friday."




  • "China's showcase east coast city, Shanghai, will soon be home to MGM Studio World, a massive new indoor entertainment complex featuring dining, shopping, nightclubs and extensive entertainment facilities, including a cinema."




  • "A city photographer has demanded 460,000 yuan (US$59,740) compensation from a decoration company he says flooded his studio, damaging 60,000 photographic plates and the 'priceless' images on them."




  • "[T]he Chinese province of Zhejiang has taken matters into its own hands. Bars and hotels in the Zhejiang province must provide customers with access to condoms and other contraceptives, or face a $650 fine for non-compliance."




  • "Wozone 我族网 is a free online social networking service that can also be used on your cell phone."


  • For more del.icio.us links, visit the Shanghaiist Contribute page, which is updated throughout the day.

    Photo by meckleychina found via the Shanghaiist Contribute page.

    Say wha? Yea 麦斯贝 (mai si bei), somewhat better known as MySpace, is launching its Chinese site in two days, or so say the good people at Sohu IT. The wildly successful social networking site is supposed to have had a complete local makeover, but if “麦斯贝” is any indication of that effort, we aren’t going in with high expectations. Other than a vague phonetic resemblance to "MySpace", the Chinese name carries no meaning of its own. In a market flush with foreign sounding brand names, 麦斯贝 could have just as easily been a water enema delivering bidet, eh-eh-good.

    (characterize) themselves in hopes of finding like minded people. Tags for this contributor? “Shanghaiist”, “Boonna” and “Kristie Lu Stout fan” are just a few tags that come to mind. The site hasn’t been around for long -- all of 13 people from Shanghai, well 14 now.

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