Cnbloggercon also held a panel discussion about China social applications. Moderated by Luyi Chen of the excellent China Web 2.0 Review blog, the panelists were from: Wealink (About in EN), Linkist (at CWRblog), Geni (at TechCrunch, at CWRblog), Haokanbu (Ignite2007 CEO presentation), and Aggua.
From the coverage that is out there, I found it hard to extract the key insights on the potential of social applications in China. Four posts can provide a starting point: David Feng’s Blognation Cnbloggercon day one post, John Kennedy’s live Cnbloggercon blog account, and Luyi Chen’s description of goals and summary of the day. If there are other insightful posts in Chinese or English about this panel let me know so I can add to this post. 
My key takeaways from the coverage and other blog commentary:
- social networks and social applications will evolve differently because Chinese netizens are more mobile and more IM/chat oriented, and hence more focused on immediacy and in a mobile format.
- social network applications may have a role in facilitating “first life” (aka real world) relationships, but to date what has been most widely adopted are social applications (such as BBS) that enable users to maintain anonymity and privacy.
- there are some differences attitudes toward trust. For example, business social networks (e.g. like Wealink or LinkedIn) rely on an underlying willingness to trust strangers (or more accurately, acquaintances of acquantances) but this doesn’t reflect how Chinese business relationships work. There may be similar differences in social relationships–where people may have a smaller, more intimate real-world network of friends and a larger, more anonymous online network of Internet acquaintances with similar interests/passions but no need or desire to tie their online persona to their real world identity. The sweet spot of Facebook and LinkedIn is around online “friends” and “connections” who like to share an online persona tied to their real world identity…this might not be what most Chinese netizens want.
- Everything is China is more complicated than it initially appears! Caveat emptor.
Luyi reports that according to Ian Chin, president of Wealink, “Chinese social networks [are] still in a disappointing winless season. If it was not the success story of Facebook, the topic we covered on the stage would have been totally different one.” According to David Feng: “In the panel was an English-speaking panelist, who stated that China copying SNS sites such a Facebook was not the way to go. The panelist also went over SNS demographics, noting that SNS users in China tend to be older, and that the Chinese tend to be more conservative. However, while the Western world trusts strangers, the Chinese, though not confident of trusting others, do have the tendency to meddle with others.” Who was this?
John Kennedy’s live blogging highlights a couple interesting points. First of all, the CNbloggercon attendees were totally unrepresentative of the overall Chinese internet consumer population, with 90% usage of social networks, 75% usage of Facebook, and 35% of LinkedIn. However, no one from Myspace.cn, QQ, or Baidu Spaces was present at the conference. Secondly, the issue of privacy was brought up. 
Ian Chin, probably in reference to Geni, reflected on the difference between ‘the West’ and China. In the West, children begin drawing family trees in kindergarten vs. ancestral relationships being a heavily guarded secret here in China. (is this still true? I can see why it was true during the Cultural Revolution but if it is still true today, why?) From John: “Classic Chinese behavior, Ian says, is doing certain things in a certain degree of privacy, in such a matter that specific parties will now know for specific reasons (ie. buying flowers for a girlfriend, buying them at a previously unknown flower shop as opposed to the one your classmate or aunt runs).”
Thomas Crampton also touches on this issue of privacy: “Unlike the US and much of Europe, where blogs dominate, a good deal of China’s conversations - on brands and other topics - take place in bulletin board services that allow a slightly higher level of anonymity than blogs.” As I mentioned in my previous post on China microblogging, this issue of privacy is more complex than a direct causal result of fear of government “harmonization” and the oversight of the Net Nanny. He also makes some points about heavy internet usage continuing to be from internet cafes, but even this point requires more detail (see below).
Via Kaiser Kuo at Ogilvy Digital Watch, I found a super insightful article in the Dec. 24 issue of Newsweek Magazine entitled “These Surfers Do It Their Own Way.” Quoting from the article:
In many ways the big difference in China can be summed up in three words: instant mobile messaging. The low proportion of home PCs has made the mobile phone the preferred Internet-access device. And Chinese clearly prefer instant messaging-chatty, real-time communications that takes place via PC or cell phone-as opposed to ordinary e-mail, in which you never know when your correspondent might respond.
Kaiser adds: “instant messaging and SMS are effectively soaking up much of the demand in China for social networking.” Unlike the US which seems to be heading toward a Facebook social network singularity (the Kango Palo Alto office is about 50 meters from the Facebook cafeteria, so hard not to think that), the China market may be much more fragmented between BBS, IM/chat based communities, social applications based on SMS, collegiate social networks like Xiaonei, Zhanzuo, Hainei, and many other flavors of social applications.
Sources: photos from Avenger, 94Smart
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