Xiaonei.com: Facebook’s Clone in Chinese

David Feng at Blognation China and Kenneth Tan at Shanghaiist are talking about Facebook’s China entry. Interestingly, Facebook has bought the domain name facebook.cn (in a bid to go local), and there is another portal owned by a Chinese guy, facebook.com.cn which points to facebook.cn.

The news-piece also talks about a social-networking platform called Xiaonei.com, a portal started in 2005 which looks and feels like Facebook except for the fact that it is in Chinese. Since its inception, Xiaonei.com has grown exponentially and covers about 2,000 university colleges in China. Not only that the portal has plans for school students and corporate also.

Guess which one is original? On your left it is Xiaonei.com and on your right it is the numero-uno Facebook.

So what would Facebook do for China? Would it buy-out Xiaonei.com, would it partner with Xiaonei.com or would perhaps follow into Google’s footsteps and would go own its own? That, only time can tell but one thing is for sure, the race for best "Social networking platform" would ensure that users benefit from the competition.

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