Week 2: Isolated
February 19th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Ask anyone whether they have a Facebook account and they are most probably to say yes. Ask anyone whether they have a Twitter account and majority will say yes. Facebook and Twitter are part of the huge social network and any social active human being would definitely have either one. However, in China, both websites are actually banned. Facebook was banned in China in 2009 due to riots in Xinjian. Other than Facebook, other social networking websites like Twitter and Youtube were also banned.
Perhaps they are too strict, or perhaps they just want to isolate themselves. However, you might wonder, without this sites, how do the Chinese communicate or expand their social relationships? Just like how we have all Facebook, the chinese people also have their top social networking site and it is Renren.com.
It is currently China’s largest social networking website with more than 160 million registered users. Renren’s background story is very similar to Facebook’s. Renren was created by graduates of Tsinghua University in Beijing and was initially called XiaoNei.Com (Inside School) which was meant for the university students.
Signing up for an account requires you to type your name in chinese and also the verification code in chinese, so non chinese can forget about signing up for an account there. The design and the features are all similar to facebook as you can see from the screenshots below.
Even with the lack of Facebook, I believed that RenRen is actually a very good tool for the chinese to expand their social networks. I also got to applaude the creators of the websites for their ability to come up with the almost exact features from Facebook 
I guess that’s what they are good at!
