For Internet companies sitting in the US, news reports that chronicled the President's every move in China were a visible reminder of the business opportunity that may seem a click away.

So, why not export social media to China just like KFC and American Idol? After all, seeing Yao Ming, arguably China's grandest international star, on Facebook and Twitter, one naturally figures, aside from the language and periodic blocking of websites, "What's the diff?"

But Facebook has gained little traction in China (with only 390,000 users), and tweets have virtually ground to a halt since the government started blocking Twitter, and these factors point to the "diff."

Simply flinging an American product into the Chinese market won't succeed, because every social media category has a Chinese equivalent that is tuned to the particular needs of the mainland Chinese market.

One of China's "Facebooks," Kaixin001.com, has already secured over 40 million users since launching only last year. The platform gained its initial popularity through applications that you would recognize from the real Facebook, such as "Friends for sale" and "Parking wars" - but with a Chinese twist.

Take, for example, the application called "Xingming Yuanfen," in which you type in a friend's name to test your "yuanfen" (i.e. your predetermined relationship with that person). Another application explains who you were in your previous life. It turns out I was a bandit, much to the chagrin of my parents.

These "fortune-telling" applications enjoy incredible popularity on computers and mobile phones. While fortune-telling jars Western sensibilities, it remains a part of Chinese culture.

The B-B-what?

But the best example of China walking to the beat of its own drummer is the continued popularity of the BBS.

That's not a typo.

That is the same bulletin board system that went by the wayside in the US with dial-up modems and US Robotics. Chinese students - who, like their counterparts in the US, are more open to experimentation than other segments - established the foundation for BBS' to flourish in China.

All major universities operate their own BBS. Peking University and Tsinghua University (which are the Harvard and MIT of China) host the Weiming BBS (named after Weiming Lake at Peking University) and Shuimu Tsinghua BBS, respectively.

With 10+ years' worth of graduates who grew up on BBS' now driving the Chinese Internet market, these same people have fueled a range of BBS sites tied to their interests and professions. According to the latest CINIC (China Internet Network Information Center) report, roughly 30% of Chinese Web users spend a significant amount of time on a BBS. So, these sites certainly transcend geekdom.

55BBS, for example, is an online community where users share discount information, coupons and other creative ways to land a good deal. Users also share news of what they got from their latest shopping spree, showing off a photo of skin care products as if it were a trophy.

Perhaps the most unique phenomenon in China is Tianya, the #1 BBS, with almost 30 million users.

What is Tianya? Think of it as a gathering place for an eclectic blend of intellectuals, journalists, freelancers, professors, researchers, gadflies, etc. Users write on and comment about sensitive social issues that may be off-limits to mainstream media. People also head to this forum to gossip about celebrities (okay, some things don't change between cultures).

A Chinese word has been coined for BBS evangelists: "Da'rens," which roughly means "people who really know how to do something." We're now starting to see some "Da'rens" parlay their popularity into commercial success. The famous makeup Da'ren known as Arora started out writing about cosmetics on a BBS before launching a blog for the mega-portal Sina.com.

From a Chinese perspective, the fundamental difference between a blog and BBS is that a BBS allows for anonymity, which appeals to the introversion of many Chinese. Blogging is also more of a solitary activity, with readers chiming in with comments later. The BBS, on the other hand, is more of a collaborative undertaking, which also appeals to the Chinese.

This all means that Internet companies from the US looking to crack the mainland Chinese market need to do their homework and tailor their products accordingly.

Here's an easy litmus test when planning your market entry in China: "What's the difference between the US and Chinese version of your product?"

If the answer takes more than 60 seconds to explain, then you've got a fighting chance.

Wei Wang is a digital consultant with The Hoffman Agency, a communications consultancy with offices in Beijing (where Wei is based) and Shanghai, as well as throughout Asia, the US and Europe. She can be reached at WWang@Hoffman.com.

The poster was an advertisement for Access Controlled, an MIT publication about the so-called Great Firewall of China, one of the first national Internet filtering systems and a policy that has come under harsh international criticism. The poster was being displays at the fourth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The purpose of the forum is to support UN mandates regarding the sustainability, robustness, security, stability, and development of the Internet.

The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.

The goal of the Open Net Initiative is to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance. We remain unclear on the exact policies the poster violated; however, we must strongly question the act of its removal, which amounts to censorship of protest of censorship - a censorship sandwich, if you will, which few of us can find appetizing.

"It is ironic that while people are allowed to gather here to discuss freedom of expression online, censorship, and surveillance practices on the Internet, we are being restricted in expressing our views," said Al Alegre of the Foundation for Media Alternatives, a member of the ONI Network, to reporters today. We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

In our previous coverage of Chinese censorship of Internet access, we alerted readers to the fact that every new computer sold after July 1, 2009 would be equipped with software "intended to block pornography and possibly filter politically disruptive material, all while quietly gathering private user data." This "Green Dam Youth Escort" software is closely related, both ideologically and politically, to the "Golden Shield Project," China's national firewall aimed at censorship and surveillance of user activity.

English is the de facto lingua franca of global business (pardon the Latin). If you want to do business globally, you have to be able to speak and write English. But most of the world's conversations occur in other languages. We want ReadWriteWeb to be a venue for conversations about innovation not just in English but in all major languages. We want to hear stories about innovation in those languages by people who live and work in those countries. We also want some of those stories to be translated back into English for a global audience - English serving as the hub, as it were.

Our Trailblazing Site in France

ReadWriteWeb France is blazing a trail that we want to follow into other countries. Web innovators in France can now read a selection of posts from ReadWriteWeb in French. Fabrice Epelboin and his team translate ReadWriteWeb posts into French, localize the stories, adding bits that make them relevant to France, and create new stories specific to France. Some of these stories are clearly important to readers outside of France, and we will be bringing these to our global audience. One example is Fabrice's crusade against the Hadopi law. The law is specific to France, but the issues are global, and other governments are working on similar issues that could have alarming outcomes. We hope that ReadWriteWeb becomes both a local and global voice on issues such as this.

5 Other Country Versions in the Pipeline

Versions of ReadWriteWeb are currently being created for:

• China
• Korea
• Spain
• Holland
• Brazil

In each country, we are working with an entrepreneur who is passionate about Web technology.

These countries are all large economies. We already know how many people from these countries read our content in English. Many more will read and engage if the content is in their local language.

Engagement is critical. Reading is easier than writing. Many people are comfortable reading a post in a foreign language: even if they don't understand everything, they at least get critical information that is not available in their native language. But writing a comment and engaging in a conversation is much harder in a foreign language.

Why We Naturally Take a Global View

Many people assume, looking at our content, that ReadWriteWeb is based in Silicon Valley. We are not. We do have writers in the Valley, and we congregate there frequently for major events. But ReadWriteWeb's founder and editor, Richard MacManus, is based in New Zealand. Our COO, Bernard Lunn, is based in New York but is a Brit who was born in Berlin and has lived and worked all around the world. We are a networked business, with no single location, using the online tools that we write about to run our business. So viewing anywhere in the world as a good place to report from and not regarding any place as "foreign" comes natural to us.

If you're going to speak about Taiwan as independent country, or the Falun Dafa and religious freedom, or even the subject of democracy, your comments and site are going to get banned. For instance, Twitter and Facebook were blocked in China after a demonstration for religious freedom led by a group of 1000 Uighur Muslims turned ugly. As users began micro-blogging the event that reportedly left at least 140 dead, the government intervened and service was suspended.

While China's constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the government employs a "subversion of state power" clause to punish those who are critical of it. Most notably this clause has been used against religious protestors like the Uighur; however, in this case the mentality of blocking dissenters can also be carried over to major social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Bing. Nevertheless, censorship in China is not new and it certainly isn't only a product of the Communist government.

In the 1200's Chinese painters used symbols of plants and animals to express their distaste for the government. For instance, the water lily came to symbolize pureness of heart because even in the murky waters of their foreign oppressors, the Chinese people would thrive and survive. If the Chinese really are "more likely to share information broadly", is it possible that under all this effort to stifle them, there are still water lilies in our midst?

Photo Credit: Max Smith, A Chinese Type 95 SPAAG vehicle on display at the "Our troops towards the sky" exhibition at the Beijing Military Museum

One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.

Weiwei has a reputation for being a hugely prolific blogger, generating around 3,000 posts in his first three years of writing online. He also uses Twitter, Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, and other sites to spread the word about freedom of expression and overt criticism of the government in China.

On July 1, he is calling for all of China's 300 million Internet users to completely log off for the day. In the original post, even Ai noted, "Chinese people are very practical. They think 'Oh, what's that going to do?'" He is aware the action he's requesting is huge; however, he feels that even a small gesture of protest will have an impact.

In his own words, "A small act is worth a million thoughts."

Given Westerners' sudden bout of green-tinted solidarity with Iranian protesters, we do wonder if Weiwei's call to action (via online inaction) will spread beyond China. What effect do you think Weiwei's protest will have? How can those of us in other countries best express our own disapproval of that nation's censorship policies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Sadly, there is also some evidence that while the Chinese government is still keenly aware of the events of June 4th 1989, a large number of young Chinese know very little about the event.

It is important to note that a lot of Google's competitors in China, including Baidu, Sohu, and Yahoo, have recently been sued by the music industry in China because of their MP3 search engines which often link to illegal copies. Indeed, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the record industry's international lobbying group, 99% of all music files distributed in China are pirated (in 2005, by the way, the piracy level in China was 'only' 85%). Baidu's MP3 search engine is responsible for about 7% of the traffic to its service.

While Google has clearly been able to work out deals with the music industry in China, it is currently locked in a number of battles with the music industry in Europe and the United States, and we don't expect that Google will offer a similar service anywhere else in the world anytime soon.

It will be interesting to see if Google manages to steal away users from Baidu thanks to this new offering. If anything, users have shown to be quite resistant when it comes to changing their search habits, and while Google's MP3 catalog is interesting enough by itself, it remains to be seen if it can be competitive against the other MP3 search engines in China.

To address these cultural differences, the Mozilla Online in Beijing created Firefox China Edition (beta), a web browser designed with the needs of the Chinese web surfers in mind.

The browser contains several features which make it useful for Chinese users, including:

• New mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn't as common a habit of Chinese users
• Some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click
• A drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China). Maxthon is usually included on the CD with the pirated copy of Windows XP that many Chinese have installed.
• A new sidebar called "Live Margins" which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks. (This sidebar is also available as the Juice addon - for more info, see our review).  

These features are all bundled together in the software known as Firefox China Edition, an optional download for Chinese web users. It is not intended to replace the version of Firefox shipped in China, only offer extra functionality if one so chooses to install it.

In a way, the China Edition reminds us a bit of Fashion Your Fox, the specialized collections of addons for the different types of web surfers. However, where Fashion Your Fox only provides links to addons, Firefox China Edition is the whole Firefox browser, preloaded with addons and extra features.

It will be interesting to see how many Chinese web surfers download this beta software. If successful, we may see more localized browsers appear in the future. 

Will this be of any consequence? We like former CNN journalist turned human rights campaigning blogger Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it: maybe.

What kinds of things have these companies done that are being frowned up?

• "In April 2004, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a U.S.-based pro-democracy website. In his email, he summarized a government order directing media organizations in China to downplay the upcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Police arrested him in November 2004, charging him with 'illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.' Authorities used email account holder information supplied by Yahoo! to convict Shi Tao in April 2005 and sentence him to 10 years in prison." - Amnesty International


• Google censors images and other information in China when the government deems the content unacceptable.
  
  Image from Search Engine Watch


• YouTube shut down, then reinstated but erased, an Egyptian activist's YouTube account filled with videos documenting police brutality. It appears that after some time YouTube has since reposted the man's videos after continued international pressure.
  

Is This Going to Change?

These are a few examples of the kinds of issues the new Global Network Initiative will likely engage with. Will the Initiative have any teeth? We're skeptical, this isn't the first time these companies have promised to do better by their users. It's hard because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets. We have a lot of respect for Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it, which we excerpt at length below.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked. If there is a rigorous process that rates the companies' behavior, then investors who care about social responsibility, and users who want to know how trustworthy a given company is compared to others, can make more informed choices.

The initiative is based on the reality that there is pretty much no country on earth - including the United States - where governments aren't pressuring telecoms and Internet companies to do things that potentially violate users' rights to privacy and free expression. Companies must consider the right to free expression and privacy of users in all markets to be part and parcel of what it means to be socially responsible. Part of the problem is that many telecoms and Internet companies just have not been thinking through
these issues as they roll out products and services around the globe, resulting in all kinds of unintended consequences - the TOM-Skype fiasco in which Skype's Chinese business partner was found to have allowed a huge security breach being the latest example. The Initiative is about getting companies to think ahead and incorporate human rights assessments into new product plans or plans to enter new markets. It's also about being more transparent and honest with your users about what's being censored, why and how, and informing them about how and with whom their personal data is being stored and shared. That way, users can make informed choices about how and when it is safe or reliable to use these services - or not.

This event was organized by the OpenWeb.Asia Workgroup and prominent entrepreneurs and bloggers within Asia's web industry.

While a good local startup in a European country can soon go international, having users from Europe and the United States, in Asia language is the top issue. Attracting users from neighbouring countries is difficult.

Each local web market in Asia is potentially huge, but these markets are still restricted and the global audience still lacks communication channels to understand the Asia web. Social networks are very popular in China. The mobile market is fascinating in Japan. Online gaming originated from and is still driven by Korea.

The India and Singapore markets could be easier entries for English-only service. Local markets like Vietnam are still quiet, but will be a battlefield for big names from China, Korea and Japan when ready for expanding. 

Social Web is Theme

Spurred by a desire to create a high-quality, informative and practical technology conference focused on the Asian Internet industry, Open Web Asia '08 was organized with 'The Social Web' as its theme.

Socialization has been a game-changing development on the Internet, and the social web is an area where Asia has its own strength and vibrancy. Asian countries have a distinct Internet culture and market players, so cross-country comparisons can be made.

Topics expected to be discussed at Open Web Asia '08 include: 1) How the Asia web sees trends in the global Internet industry; 2) The innovations in Asia's web; 3) The mobile and online gaming markets; 4) What are the challenges of internationalizing an Internet business to and from Asia?

Open Web Asia '08 provides a stage where leaders Kim James Woo (CEO, Yahoo Korea), Kevin Day (CEO, Comsenz China), Yoonjoon Hyoung (founder of Cyworld, Korea), Shusaku Maruko (corporate strategy, Felica, Japan) can share their insights with Western experts and entrepreneurs such as Loic Le Meur (CEO, Seesmic) and Kent Lindstrom (SVP, Friendster).

In association with one of the most prestigious conferences in Asia, World Knowledge Forum, the event will be held on October 14, 2008 in Seoul, Korea. For more information, go to the official web site.

It's Open Season

'Open' is one of the hottest words right now in the Asia web. Google is focusing on Asian markets and promoting its open strategies. Sohu has localized Netvibes' UWA. Yiqi was the first Chinese open platform fully supporting OpenSocial.

IDtail brought OpenSocial to Korea, and Mixi said yes the day OpenSocial was announced. Comsenz has developed its own ManYou Open Platform (MYOP) to target the China market.

With many open platforms announced and imminent, China and the Asia web need to assess how to monetize the Open web and prepare for the widget economy. Though the global Internet industry is still dominated by Western giants, opening up Asia will benefit both the regional and global Internet industries.

The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.

New online media have opened the doors to people publishing on budgets that would never have supported journalistic efforts in the past. That new generation of publishers has a greater freedom to take risks because they aren't as beholden to the interests of sponsors. That's one way to describe the political impact on journalism of blogging - another way might be that these new media have opened up publishing to activists with less interest in objectivity than traditional journalists have aimed for.

Either way, the impact of blogging and video blogging on the world at large is widely recognized and it's no surprise that the authoritarian Chinese government is taking steps to protect itself. We condemn the detention of any journalists, whether they strive for objectivity or tell stories from a particular perspective.

According to extensive coverage on BoingBoing, the following US journalists and/or activists are all currently missing:
- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

We're working on creating a widget displaying video, information and a button to call US Congressional representatives but for now we'll leave you with the following video published by Conley in China last week. Update: Ribbit.com doesn't want to give us an account promptly, so we'll just say - if you want to call the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee to register your concern about the 5 people above, they are at +1 202 225 5021 and they are waiting for you. We just called them a few minutes ago.

The letters sent to Durbin are not very concrete in their description of the code, though they all stress the following three core components:

Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy that provide direction and guidance to the ICT industry and its stakeholders in protecting and advancing the enjoyment of freedom of expression and privacy globally. The Principles describe key commitments in the following areas: Freedom of Expression; Privacy; Responsible Company Decision Making; Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration; Governance, Accountability, Transparency.

Implementation Guidelines that provide further details on how participating companies will put the Principles into practice. The Implementation Guidelines describe a set of actions which constitute compliance with the Principles and provide companies with guidance on how to implement the Principles.

A Governance, Accountability and Learning Framework founded on the notion that an organizational and multi-stakeholder governance structure is required to support the Principles and that participating companies should be held accountable for their role in the implementation of the Principles through a system of independent assessment.

All three companies also stress that this code could potentially have far-reaching effects on their operations in countries like China and that they have already established internal rules for how to deal with these issues.

During the Olympics, even journalists will not be allowed to access the full and open Internet, thanks to an agreement between the IOC and China, though China eased at least some of these restrictions after the first reports on this.

As Jim Puzzanghera notes in the LA Times, Yahoo especially has been criticized heavily for the way it handled the case of journalist Shi Tao in 2006. At that time, Yahoo revealed his identity as being linked to a Yahoo e-mail address after being pressured by Chinese officials. Shi Tao was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The most well-known Facebook copycat is Xiaonei.com. It was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched. The same layout, same colour scheme and even a very similar logo made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook. Xiaonei was bought by Oak Pacific Interactive, which recently sold its approximately 35% share to Softbank for $430 million.

Of course, it was not only Xiaonei that copied the design of Facebook. The latest development in the Facebook clone market is a new look-a-like called Yiqi.com - created by Wen Xie, former CEO of Yahoo China and a very influential veteran in China's Web. Also check out UCenter, a customizable Facebook clone developed by Comsenz. The lastest stats from Comsenz is that over 50,000 UCenters have been set up, only 3 months after its release.

Change and Evolution

Similar layouts do not mean these Chinese Facebooks function the same as the real Facebook. Being an online social network for Chinese people, it has to understand the Chinese social culture. Xiaonei released a feature called Market, where you can sell and buy second hand things. The second-hand market is an event almost every student union has to organize at least once every semester in Chinese universities.

UCenter has integrated with Comsenz's other products, such as BBS (bulletin board system) product Discuz!. If you know how popular BBS is in China, you would not be surprised that the number of installations of UCenter soars everyday.

Yiqi is trying to tell users that their real life can be reflected on the online world. In Yiqi, you can find features such as Block, Square, Newspaper etc.

I took screenshots of the top menu and side bar of all these sites. It is very interesting to see that the features on each site are different and have been well localized, which actually reflects the change and evolvement of Chinese Facebooks.

Vertical Social Networks

How many social networks should a user register for? If your friends are on new social networks, you will soon be invited and most likely will have to do registrations over and over again. Later you will receive some invites (application invites, event invites, etc) most of which you just are not interested in at all. What's the value of joining so many generic SNS? China too has this problem. Enter the vertical SNS.

Hainei was founded by Xing Wang, who was also the co-founder of Xiaonei. Xiaonei has become a Facebook focusing on the Internet industry vertical. On Hainei, most of the users are linked to the Internet industry, which in this case means it doesn't have an active Female user base.

5GSNS was founded by Keso, the most influential Chinese blogger. It is built on UCenter and is a social network helping users find a job in the IT industry (see screenshot below).

Distributed Facebooks

Comsenz's Discuz! BBS platform dominates 70% of the Chinese online forum space. UCenter can be bundled with Discuz!, and together they could become a standard for many Chinese web sites. Whereas the western world Facebook is trying to aggregate all applications into one place, in China many mini Facebooks are distributed and fully controlled by users. I should also mention that UCenter supports Themes, which means that they may end up not being Facebook look-a-likes (see screenshot below).

Conclusion

Debating the copycat model of the Chinese Internet market is getting boring; Facebook's official impact on China is still an interesting question, but there are many more options available to the Chinese social network user. SOHU, the top Chinese portal, partnered with Netvibes for its open blog platform in Oct 2007 [disclosure: Gang Lu works for Netvibes] , a sign of the Chinese Internet embracing the Open concept. The latest news is that several popular local SNSs - including Xiaonei, Hainei, Yiqi - have joined Google OpenSocial. Rumour has it that Sina and QQ are planning their own open platforms too.

Indeed the Open Platform is now one of the hottest topics in China. The question remains though: how will Chinese users respond to open SNSs and will any of the local Chinese social networks go global?

There was a flurry of rumors in November 2007 that Facebook was looking into acquiring Zhanzuo.com, one of a number of mid-sized Chinese social networks with about seven million users. That acquisition, however, never materialized. Currently, the largest social network in China is 51.com with over 60 million users.

Facebook's largest competitor, MySpace already launched a Chinese-language version of its site in 2006.

Besides the translation, it doesn't look as if Facebook made any changes to its layout to cater to the Chinese speaking market.

Facebook is entering an already crowded market in China and it remains to be seen if it can establish itself against the bevy of clones and original services such as Xiaonei, Zhanzuo, 51.com, and Xiaoyou that have already established themselves there by now. It will also be interesting to see if Facebook will try to pursue a different monetization strategy for the Chinese market similar to what Twitter is doing for its Japanese version.