Renren and Facebook, how much do you know?

Ace Radio：Theme - 社交网络之人人 VS. Facebook

收听地址：http://www.engbus.cn/aceradio/2012-02-09/145.html

The topic we have this time is about a website we young people almost meet with everyday. What is it? Well, it’s obvious that there is no need to guess, as I have already put it in the title up there.

Bingo, it’s Renren Website, whose former name should be Xiaonei.com. And I get two questions here for all of you who have used it before or maybe are exactly using it right now. The first question is that which name do you think is better? The second question should be how much do you know about Renren—the website that lives together closely with us everyday. Ok, I will do you a great favor by telling you something about it, so, get yourself ready.

Xiaonei.com or we say Renren is a real social network which gives you a chance to connect with your friends around. By joining in it, you are able to exhibit yourself, get to know new guys and succeed in finding those old ones. Also, Xiaonei.com makes it comfortable for people to use the functions such as logs and albums to record even the slightest things in life. In Xiaonei.com, you will receive the latest situation about the people you care, at same time, if you have great ideas on music, movie or book, you should see that some one is always there waiting for you to share.

In October, 2006, after China InterActive Corp purchasing the old version, this SNS website shook hands with its formal domain name as www.xiaonei.com. So, as we can see, Xiaonei.com has already been a campus network that monopolizes eighty or even ninety percent of the lots in the market of Chinese academicians.

However, from the very beginning, it’s just a social network created in December, 2005 by a couple of college students from Tsing-Hua University and Tianjin University. Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang, Tang Yang, these pubers are the ones you’d better imprint in your mind, because they are the actual fathers of our best cyber buddy.

Graduated from University of Delaware, Wang Xing came back to Zhongguancun to imbark. He aimed at SNS, namely social networking service. At that time, Friendster.com has made its way in the United States of America, while in China there is still a blank in this area. Therefore he caught the opportunity to copy the successful American mode. As it should be for almost all those people who imbark, failure blocked off his street with an evil smile. After that, he finally hugged with a senior who dragged him from the bottom to the top—a senior whose name is known to all—Facebook.

Keeping abreast with MySpace.com, as a famous university student community, Facebook.com was set up by students in Harvard University. Its most important characteristic is the closeness. How to understand the closeness? Well, Facebook.com merely is open to students in college, and no one is able to register without an edu domain name as well as the authentification of the user’s real ID. Wang Xing, together with millions of college students in America, witnessed the tight connection between young people and Facebook. So he decided to start his own Facebook, the first wide spreading SNS website in China. So he did it, and he shook the ground.

Here I have a section from Mark Zuckerberg’s speech in Stanford, and I think we will see the original idea of Facebook and Renren from it.

All right, now we have already gotten our two heroes on the stage. The next thing I wanna do is to compare them.

The reason why people consider Renren as Facebook’s first approved apprentice in China mainly comes from two aspects. Firstly, they are both Internet tools. I take it here as nonsense, which means we all have known it five thousand years ago. Secondly, they utilize the relation we’ve already set up in our real life, and reconstruct it in the Internet with the help of the tool. Then, freshly, an Internet relation is honorably born to this colorful world. Though it seems quite like a cheap stealing, in which people are still those people; new connotation of the relation is added in. Well, it’s what we call “the Facebook relation”. On this point, Renren acts exactly the same as its senior.

To put it simply, I would like to show a model to you. Harry Potter did know Dumbledore in the Hogwarts School, face to face. They might know each other’s outside appearance, or favorite food such as the chocolate frog, or the handwriting you name it; but we have to admit that they are strangers to each other on the Internet. While with Facebook, these two lines cross together. Harry Potter will have a virtual role which is simultaneously enriched by his photographs, logs, states of his mood, and people he consorts with. Then, Harry Potter and Dumbledore happily are acquaintances again. You will understand this more clearly if you drag kaixin001.com and its msn in the comparison.

After the common grounds, I proceed them with the differences.

From the aspect of the user behavior, Chinese ones are apparently active than those who use Facebook, whose rate can almost reaches two times. And Renren gives more attentions to the individuation of its products and modules; that is Renren commits itself to the enaction aiming at each user. For example, the PHP, which means the Personal Home Page on Renren.com shows the callers, and it’s not gonna happen to Facebook.

What’s more, difference springs out on the business simulation, too. Renren has followed the needs of big advertisers closely at the very beginning, and its advertised products are more diversified. On the contrary, Facebook mainly faced to minor enterprises, and made money from some precise advertisements until one or two years ago.

Of course, by the way, their biggest distinction should lie in one point that Facebook has not come into the market, while our Bugs Bunny has been crazily bouncing around in the stock market for some time.

Actually I wanted to find a video section on the process of building up about Renren, unfortunately nothing much available, worthy and spoken in English hit between my eyes. Yet I assume that you guys might also be interested in the founder of Renren’s tutor, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg who earned his millions at the age of 21, and his experience of founding Facebook. So I changed my mind by dedicating this prevue—the social network—to all of you. It’s absolutely welcome if you are attracted and watch the whole movie after this.

I think that an epoch-making product is doomed to belong to a genius, and Facebook’s creator who is also the predecessor of our Renren.com is definitely standing in the line. By connecting the two founders, a summary catches us: we use cyber social networks to make friends; they use it to build an age; an age that is linked with all those young people who live in two countries whose sum of the land’s area attracts worldwide attention.

Talking about all these, about Renren, about Facebook, about Wang Xing and Mark Zuckerberg, feelings submerge us. Because changes are coming.

For Facebook, and its 500 extraordinary and talented engineers, innovation never stops. According to the report by foreign media, Facebook’s new web page design has received a patent for “curated search” which is able to sort the search results in terms of the users’ social intercourse data. This is a first stage stab by Facebook in the search area, and it’s also the next lucrative hotspot in the search market as many people evaluated. Facebook contains Being’s drive on the search result in its body and offers Being back some data in order to adjust its items. By doing this, analysis shows that Facebook together with Being will make a new competition with Google.

And when we go back to Renren, tears may be more than smiles.

After being purchased by China InterActive Corp, Xiaonei.com again was transferred and “changed its nationality” with 4 billion RMB from China to Japan, which raised a violent public controversy about leaking the information of 15 million college students in China and giving the opportunity of analyzing the future of China to Japanese. From then on, Xiaonei is no longer a name that exists on the screen, and Renren becomes quickly familiar to us.

Somebody feels regretful over the purchase and master’s change happened to Renren; somebody may consider the name of Xiaonei better than the new one. However, fact is fact; we can do nothing about what has been pinned on the board. But being purchased is not that pathetic, it could be a new start, too. As its father Wang Xing wrote in his blog the second day he lost his baby, which was also a saying by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

I should like to propose a toast to Renren, for its healthy upgrowth and our lively cyber life. I think perhaps you have the same wish as I do, because no matter what, it’s still the most important and famous social network in our country.