Facebook said to be bidding on Chinese Social Network
Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has pointed to a Times story reporting that Facebook has bid $85 million [USD] for Zanzuo, a very popular Chinese language social network. This would give Facebook, it's first Chinese-language beachhead in the exploding Chinese language beach head.
When I interviewed Chinese blogger-investor-entrepreneur Isaac Mao, for my SAP Global Survey, he told me that Facebook was growing rapidly among English speaking Chinese as was Twitter. That's good. But the language of China is Chinese, not English and the potential of Zanzuo is that it could make Facebook one of China's leading destination sites and probably the most popular site under Western ownership.
The deal is not yet accepted. It will be interesting to see which way this goes.
Sounds like a good buy! In the Netherlands there's a Dutch variant to Facebook, called Hyves(.nl). It really has boomed since it started.
Btw, I'm having a good read with 'Naked Conversations' at the moment. Great job!
greetings,
Arjan
Posted by: Arjan | November 20, 2007 at 03:54 AM
I agree that language is one of the key challenges all social networking sites will face as they continue their global expansion and play in different regions/cultures.
In terms of local popularity, I wonder if the real competitor here for FaceBook isn't "Friendster." According to recent survey by comScore, Friendster attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.
Other interesting data: "both MySpace.com (62 percent) and Facebook.com (68 percent) attract approximately two-thirds of their respective audiences from North America. Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent)."
It might be a matter of putting in place the old jargon/strategy: Think globally, act locally. Voilà!
Posted by: Georgete Pereira | November 20, 2007 at 01:07 PM
Forgot to mention that Friendster offer versions in English | 繁體中文 | 简体中文 | Español...
Posted by: Georgete Pereira | November 20, 2007 at 01:17 PM
Forgot to mention that Friendster offer versions in English | 繁體中文 | 简体中文 | Español...
Posted by: Georgete Pereira | November 20, 2007 at 01:18 PM