Kaixin001.com, Xiaonei.com, Renren.com, 51.com, China SNS

In China, over 124 million users have been registered on China’s social network site (SNS) including www.kaixin001.com, www.renren.com (formerly www.xiaonei.com), www.kaixin.com, and www.51.com, before the end of 2009.

China’s Top 3 Social Network Sites (SNS)

Read Write Web believes Renren.com (formerly Xiaonei.com), Kaixin001.com and 51.com are the 3 most popular Chinese social network sites (SNS).

What is Kaixin001.com?

Kaixin001.com is a Chinese social networking site that was launched in 2008 and provides a blogging and microblogging platform, with music sharing, photo uploading, and online hard drives.

Kaixin001′s target audience is the Chinese “white-collar” population.

    www.Kaixin001.com

Kaixin001 Social Games and Applications

Kaixin001.com offers addictive games to Chinese SNS users. The games are applications/add-ons can be installed and played instantly on Kaixin001.

  • Poke: Notify another user by poking him/her.
  • Gifts: Give your friends surprise gifts.
  • Try to Guess: Match yourself to another user for friendship, relationship or hatred with his/her name and your name.
  • Music Locker: Play music and recommend music to your friends.
  • Friends for Sale: Players buy/sell their friends like slaves, and make money out of each trade.
  • Happy Farm: Players manage their lands by growing vegetables and stealing other players’ vegetables.
  • Parking Wars: Players buy/sell cars, raise money, and compete for packing slots.

Some of the games on Kaixin001, such as Parking Wars, has embedded ads running on the side.

From Xiaonei.com to Renren.com

Xiaonei.com launched with a Facebook-cloned interface and became China’s largest SNS in 2008. “Xiaonei” means “in-school” which implies Xiaonei was initially targeting university students. Xiaonei.com tried to remove this “in-school” impression by rebranding to Renren.com in August 2009.

    www.Renren.com / www.Xiaonei.com

Kaixin.com vs Kaxin001.com

Renren purchased Kaixin.com, an extremely similar domain name to Chinese SNS competitor Kaixin001, and launched Kaixin.com as another Chinese social network site which has raised “brand confusion” to many Chinese SNS users. This caused Kaxin001.com to put up a lawsuit against Kaixin and Renren.

    www.Kaixin.com

Global Social Networking Sites

Wikipedia shows one of the biggest lists of social network websites with each site’s launch date, audience types, and number of registered users.

eBizMBA selected August 2010′s top 20 global SNS by using the average of each site’s global traffic rank from Alexa, and each site’s US traffic rank from Compete and Quantcast:

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Ning
  • Tagged
  • Classmates.com
  • Hi5
  • MyYearBook
  • MeetUp
  • Bebo
  • MyLife
  • Friendster
  • MyHeritage
  • Multiply
  • Orkut
  • Badoo
  • GaiaOnline
  • BlackPlanet
  • SkyRock

Facebook Not Popular in China

Facebook, the SNS with the largest user base in the world, has the most registered users from US, UK, Indonesia, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, Philippines, Mexico, Spain, and India, but does not have many registered users in China.

Due to language, culture, marketing effort, local competition and probably most of all – government suppression of access to the site.

  • Facebook has not put up a Chinese language interface before 2008.
  • Access to Facebook was blocked from China in 2009.

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