What’s the future of micro blog in China?
More and more people pay attention to Chinese Internet since google announced closing China’s offices. More and more Chinese netizens are getting to know about facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com. They never accessed to these sites before and they won’t in the future since China’s Internet is a “Free” internet.
We don’t have facebook but we have xiaonei.com; we don’t have youtube but we have cntv.cn; we don’t have twitter, but it seems that there isn’t a Chinese version of twitter site in China yet.
More and more people want to make another twitter-like site in China. SINA, Follow5.com and other SNS sites are trying their best to compete in this field and want to become the winner.
But let’s step back and review this market. In China, the most real SNS is QQ, an IM software just like MSN, but much much better than MSN, made by Tencent.com. You can interact with your friends very easily via QQ and QQ has everything that SNS sites should have. But the problem is QQ is not an open platform and it doesn’t provide API to developers. There isn’t any threat to QQ in China right now since there isn’t a company can compete with QQ.
Take XiaoNei.com for example. Xiaonei.com is currently the largest SNS site in China. With so many years of growing, Xiaonei.com has also brought up their own desktop tool. Their purpose is very simple: By doing so they hope to gradually grab QQ’s market. There are some other companies in China making their own IM too, such as 51.com, SNDA.com, Taobao.com etc. But none of these comapanies succeded in shaking QQ’s position. Even MSN can’t beat QQ either since MSN is only widely used among white collars in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. But everyone has a QQ number and the teens who were born after 1990 are faithful users of QQ. They would spend over 10 RMB a month for buying avatars.
So what’s the future of micro blog in China?
There are different possibilities. But no matter how successful you are, you will compete directly with QQ. If QQ opens the QQ status API, this will become unbreakable advatange and it can destroy any new competitor in this field.
But we would like to see that day coming since being slaved by QQ isn’t a good thing too.
Another thought is that if you have tried QQ International version, you will find that it could beat MSN in USA. But that’s another story or that might be only a legend that we are not going to talk about today.
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