Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Alan Rutledge, who formerly worked as a developer for Idealab, the startup incubator behind Google Picasa and Yahoo Overture.
Kaixin001, the latest newcomer to the Facebook clone wars in China, is China’s fastest growing social network having amassed a staggering 7.5 million users in the first 5 months since it launched in May 2008. The site tripled Twitter’s traffic reach in the month of September alone and is currently the 250th most popular site on Alexa worldwide.
Compared with rival incumbent Xiaonei, which targets college students, Kaixin001 appeals to white-collar office workers with a simpler UI that is more intuitive to older audiences. This is a significant detail in China, where one in four college students does not own a computer and can only access Xiaonei by walking to an Internet Cafe and paying by the minute. White-collar office workers by comparison, spend an average of nine hours a day in front of the computer.
Kaixin001 succeeds simply by cloning only the most successful Facebook applications and bringing them to the Chinese market before anyone else. Examples of viral hits that they have cloned are:
- Friends for Sale: Females have an unfair advantage in this game thanks to China having one of the highest male-to-female ratios in the world.
- Parking Wars: Ironically most people in China can’t afford a real car, which makes this game all the more compelling.
- iLike: Up until recent crackdowns, the Chinese equivalent allowed you to upload and share your entire music collection with your friends.
- Where I’ve Been: This application defaults to a province map of China because most people have never left the country.
A non-clone worthy of note is Online Storage, a cloud-based file sharing application that harks back to Facebook’s early forays into peer-to-peer file sharing, when Sean Parker of Napster-fame was still president of the fledgling startup.
Blatant cloning may be shunned in the Valley, but in China and other parts of the world, cloning is the expectation of financial backers who benefit from the lower investment risk profile. Being too slow to clone has in fact hurt Xiaonei, which is now being overshadowed by Kaixin001’s 90% month-to-month growth rate.
As a fledgling 20-man startup with limited resources, why does Kaixin001 develop all of its apps? At a time when the Western World is embracing open web platforms, this approach strikes us as counter-intuitive and even backwards. Chinese web platforms, however, face several critical issues:
- Limited access to capital: Venture capital is scarce in China. By comparison, close to a quarter billion dollars has been pumped into Facebook applications to-date.
- Weak online ad markets: Chinese web companies rely heavily on virtual goods and micro-transactions; neither model works for most of Kaixin001’s applications.
- Rampant software piracy: There are proportionately fewer developers available to build 3rd party applications in China due to limited job opportunities as a direct result of piracy keeping the market for software stagnant.
- The Language Barrier: Most open source languages and documentation are available primarily in English. Chinese people who would otherwise make good programmers struggle with this additional hurdle.
The 700 third-party applications on Xiaonei have a huge variability in quality. Kaixin001 has only 25 applications, yet it retains complete control over quality and and has the speed and focus needed to bring well-tuned viral hits to the Chinese market faster than its competitors—perhaps the better strategy in hindsight.
Hundreds of thousands of people quite regularly visit kaixin.com instead of the correct kaixin001.com domain name. Recently, Xiaonei’s parent company purchased the kaixin.com domain name with plans to launch a Kaixin001 clone that would steal its rivals users. This effectively makes Kaixin a clone of a clone of a clone. Amazing.
Kaixin001 was founded by a former executive from Sina.com (the Yahoo! of China) and recently closed a $4-5 million first round from Northern Light Venture Capital.
Wow…is this correct -”most people in China can’t afford a real car” ?
Yep, it’s pretty much the reality if you consider the whole population in China. But in large cities, especially Beijing, Shanghai, GuangZhou, people are buying cars, real ones of course. Most of my friends in Beijing, in their 20’s, own cars now. They are ordinary people, just the white collars mentioned in this article, not rich, but not too bad though.
Cars tend to be about half the price in China. Millions of bikes though. It is an adventure driving in China.
yes, i also heard there were many bicycles in beijing
SOME chinese brands of cars are cheap yes. Most cars are much more expensive than the west. Any imported car is heavily taxed and about 100% more expensive.
Honestly, as a Chinese, i need to tell the truth. it is really hard for every family in China to afford a car. You see, we have so great large number of people. it is amazing that most of us can feed ourselves. of this, i feel very proud.
Cars in China are expensive (not just China, in fact, in most places other than the US, including Japan, Malaysia, etc.). You can expect to pay the equivalent price of a Lexus in the US (after currency conversion) just to get a Civic over there. Combine that with the fact that people make way less money in general.
Thnx for the info.
Hey Joe, why don’t you get off of the comment boards and go do some research. idiot
No they are not. Certain brands are. You can’t even compare China to Malaysia. Not even close.
What I mean by that is a lot of cars are half the price in China. High end cars are the same worldwide in general. Malaysia is very expensive for cars. Still there is a ton of money there.
“Recently, Xiaonei’s parent company purchased the kaixin.com domain name with plans to launch a Kaixin001 clone that would steal its rivals users. This effectively makes Kaixin a clone of a clone of a clone.”
This is really funny to read but a serious issue if you think deeper. What will happen if it continues or spread to other social sites?
some comments:
* college internet access: dorm room internet access is now common place, university usually provides low-cost or no-cost internet access as well
* kaixin’s app platform: as far as I have observed, there’s no platform at all, all “apps” appeared to have been hard-coded in; development cost of a platform is significantly higher
* language barrier: english is taught as early as 5th grade in schools (7th grade in all schools); universities are using english text books. i doubted if there’s going to be any barrier
* availability of developers: millions of people work in software outsourcing, with the right pay, good ones are not hard to find
KAI XIN, both pronounced with high tones, means happy or happy. WAN, low tone from deep in your throat, means network. Thus, KAI XIN WAN is the happy network.
XIAO NEI, both with downward tones i.e. start high, finish deep in your throat, means ’school inner’ or on-campus network.
FYI.
-Dash
http://adEcon101.blogspot.com/
Actually, Kaixin also purchased the xiaonei001.com domain name :p
Kaixin001.com is a bad bad name for the company. They shouldn’t have used this kind of name at the first place. Probably they already tried to get kaixin.com, but still. If you search kai xin wang in google, you don’t get Kaixin001.com in the first page. There are: Kaixin.com, KaixinWang.com.. etc. FYI, “wang” means web in Chinese. Now let’s see, it surely a fatal mistake.
Number based names in Asia tend to do well. I live in China all of 2006 and part of 2007, exploring the web possibilies over there. Design and programming infrastrucutre is weak, programming languages are very basic, Apple is a huge mystery and investors stil have hint of corruption you can feel. Maybe things have changed, but when I see 7.5M people flocking to a site like this, I cant help but think it’s the same.
Curious as to why the use .com instead of a Chinese domain like .cn .
Looks like the only way to register on here is by getting an invite from someone you know. I tried to register for a new account and received the following:
“开心网目前还处于测试期，暂不对公众开放新用户注册。
如果您想加入开心网，请您向已在开心网注册的朋友索取邀请链接，然后从该邀请链接注册。
谢谢您的支持！”
Which if I understand correctly says something like they are in a limited beta or invite by friend only. Anyone on this that can provide an invite?
let me know your email address. I can invite.
Thanks Richard. You can send to me at rmowery at gmail.com
http://www.kaix...%9C%8B%E5%8F%8B
your invite.
Zeng i would like to get in too chase.mcmichael at gmail.com thx
now there is xiaonei.com xiaonei001.com and kaixin.com kaixin001.com
who knows if there will be any more? cause they all look like the same clone
damn, that’s a great article alan… excellent stuff for those of us who are pretty ignorant on the chinese market. thanks for the education!
btw, i also highly recommend reading Benjamin Joffe’s stuff too:
http://www.plus8star.com/
“A non-clone worthy of note is Online Storage, a cloud-based file sharing application…”
Please, don’t abuse the term “cloud-based file sharing”…
Such a waste of effort to me. People recreate same stuff over and over. It’s not necessarily bad though, it’s just boring.
Many it workers in china love to use kaixin001
where is the data for those charts of daily unique visitors? When I searched Google Trends, all I get is “kaixin001.com does not have enough search volume for ranking”
Why do they need a car? They all just walk to school, work, shopping… it’s not like in US where you have to drive to places. I dunno whats up with all the facebook/myspace clone thing going on…
Hi Richard could you please invite me too my email is chase.mcmichael at gmail.com I would very much like to ask you a few q’s in your use of kaixin001.com Thanks
Chase
we are looking for an asia social network development company. It must be have the IT knowledge to reproduce http://www.xiaonei.com/ english version.
We are building africas social networking website like facebook.
please email me: info@i-fanz.com
people are very notrious
葫芦网是一个真实的社交网络，联络你的朋友，兴趣及职业群组，校友和地区网络；分享相片、博客和书签；参与论坛、活动和集市。
huloo.com very good !
it is not a fair article to discribe the factors of success of Kaixin001.com.
who can meet the needs of customers, who may get the prize from customers. kaixin001 is definately not pure clone of facebook, he is a platform which is more friendly for chinese local users to use and play on it.
and about commerical effects of kaixin001, i should say, it is also more successful than facebook. the soft advertising effects are amazing. like parking wars, through it, we can get touch of difference kinds of car and know the price of it.
And not like facebook is for ’show your life to friends’, kaixin001 has more interactive apps like friends for sale, through it we could know who is more popular than others…
and kaixin001’s apps are improving every week… it develops fast, like everywhere in china. That is the charm of kaixin001 which attracts not only young generation but also serious business man to get their networks.
I love kaixin001 in China, but i do not give up facebook in Germany. Kaixin001 is just like his name (happiness), brings more entertainment in my life, but also give me surprise like to help me find more old friends who i lost their contacts..
ok. i said too much. as chinese, i love Kaixin001 much more than facebook. that is all.