Will you join us to slay the mighty Sina Weibeast, O Microsoft of Redmond? "Renren, a Chinese social networking website, will integrate its services with MSN, Microsoft's Internet portal, the companies announced on Wednesday. Reuters reported that netizens will be able to share login access, status updates and instant massaging on both platforms, according to their agreement. The collaboration between the two former competitors reflects a trend of alliances in social networking services, combating pressure from front-runners such as Chinese micro-blogging site Sina Weibo and instant messenger provider QQ, industry analysts said. China is the world's largest Internet market with around 480 million users, and half of them use social networking websites." [China Daily] more ›

You have to be living under a particularly obscure rock if you've never heard of the mega giant Twitter rip-off that is “Sina Weibo.” Heck, even Radiohead and Tom Cruise know about it. more ›

Radiohead is now the latest in a growing (if slowly) trend of Western celebs opening Sina weibo accounts to reach out to their Chinese followers. Last Friday, the English mega-stars made their inaugural "tweet", which was a rather lifeless "testing the weibo." Either they didn't expect the resulting response, or they simply didn't care to draft an initial message with any feeling to the Chinese weibo universe. That intial post has, in four days, been forwarded almost 11,000 times and received 4,100 comments, and they have received over 60,000 followers. more ›

The Washington Post is reporting that Google's shiny new attempt at an answer to Facebook, Google+ (in "field trials" right now, probably just to make it sound cooler as it remains "invite only") has already been blocked in China! more ›

In light of the rumors raging over a Facebook China partnership with Baidu, we decided to check in on the recent China numbers from SocialBakers (a site that monitors Facebook users by country.) Back in February, we saw users more than double following Mark Zuckerberg's visit in December. This month, the numbers are way, way down. Not a gradual drop off, mind you. On April 5, about 40% of Chinese Facebookers disappeared. more ›

Wow. All that speculation, the flirtation, the obsession, but we never thought it would actually happen. Could it be true? According to Sohu and others, yes it could, and probably is. Following all the rumors and Mark Zuckerberg's recent trip to China, Facebook has now reportedly signed a deal with Baidu. more ›

So after almost two years in beta mode, QQ International - the English-language and other version of the wildly popular QQ chat platform - is finally officially released. You can read about it here with Techcrunch or in this older exclusive on Cnet, or you can just give it a whirl by downloading it here. And you may not remember this, but Shanghaiist actually has a QQ group: 35321512. We promise to get on it now that it's for real. more ›

Well it’s Monday again, which means it’s time for our weekly list of everything there is to do around Shanghai this Monday through Thursday. And this week it’s all about social networking... more ›

"The Internet is a tidal wave that is going to be impossible for anyone to keep out," Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was quoted as saying during an event at SXSW in Austin, TX. "In places like China it is hard to say how long those firewalls will be able to hold up." more ›

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). more ›

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 ›

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+. more ›

• 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, 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". more ›

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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. more ›

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! more ›

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! more ›

Scene from HiPiHi.com from Torley. more ›

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 ›

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] more ›

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. more ›

(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. more ›