Xiaonei and Facebook - Huge differences, but who cares?
Xiaonei, which is called “the Facebook of China,” has a very similar user interface as Facebook. It provides similar but simplified functionalities. While western media often compare the two and discuss about the potential competitions they may have, I don’t think in recent time there will be any big competition between them.
In many senses Xiaonei and Facebook do the same thing. They are both social network systems and are both platforms designed mainly for people who already know each other to get connected or reconnected. However, there’s really a long way to go for both of them to have a real competition with each other.
Xiaonei has absolute advantage in China. They started in as early as 2005 and accumulated a huge number of Chinese users. According to the recent news reports, they also raised a lot of money. But Facebook, on the other hand, has not even officially entered China (or just started to do so). As the result, even with the assumption Facebook gets started to enter the big Chinese market, they still need a lot of efforts to get the users to them. And many Xiaonei users may even think that Facebook copies Xiaonei, since they’ve never known Facebook before.
However, Facebook currently has absolute advantage in technology. Although Xiaonei looks really like Facebook, they don’t get the same underlying technology, even for basic features. Every single software system has problems and bugs, but Xiaonei still has enough technical problems (bugs) to give users a bad experience. They need a long way to go to be technically comparable to Facebook. As a user, I hope Xiaonei will invest more to the development team and create software with better quality. In addition to the quality issue, Facebook makes itself an open platform. They provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to third party. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can develop their own applications or plug-ins for Facebook. By doing so, the contents of Facebook have been dramatically enriched. This also help creates a better user experience.
Now you may realize why I make the point that Xiaonei and Facebook will not even in competition in a short time. They both have advantages that the other can’t catch up in a short time. Xiaonei will get more and more users and eventually succeed within China, while Facebook will continue their success in other parts of the world. I, as a user of both systems, just hope both of them can get better and provide us a great user experience. I hope Xiaonei can continually improve their technology; and Facebook can continue their efforts on globalization.
It will be fun to see what the situation is again in 5 years.