In April, I was invited to the China Webmaster Annual Conference in Beijing. It was a great honor sitting with these great guys in China web: Wen Xie, ex-CEO of Hexun and founder of Yiqi; Shendong Pang, CEO of 51, a super fast growing local SNS; Kevin Day, CEO and founder of Comsenz whose UCenter is ‘breaking Chinese SNS market into pieces’; Gang Fang, VP of Sohu who is leading Sohu’s Open Platform; Xing Wang, who is reported the pioneer of Chinese Facebook. Xing founded Xiaonei and later sold it to Oak Pacific Interactive. Xing also founded Fanfou, a clone of Twitter and now he is focusing on his second Facebook liker: Hainei; Chuan Luo, ex-CEO of MSN and now CEO of Myspace China.
The Revolution and Future of Social Networks, is the topic of this panel. We went through a wide range of issues around Social Networks in China. We did not discuss much about the Open Web/Open Platform, but interesting enough, today all these leading Chinese SNSs have more of less make themselves Open: Myspace China has its open platform which is part of Myspace headquarters’s strategy; Yiqi and Hainei have agreed to support OpenSocial; Sohu has its open platform launched back in Janurary; 51 is reported that its platform supposedly would be launched in June, although I did not believe it; The latest news I am very curious about its potential impact is ManYou Open Platform (MYOP) developed by Comsenz for its UCenter. Besides, AOL China is planning Yourminis and Goowy in China; Yahoo China’s platform ZhanZhangTianXia will be supporting widgets; CSDN, the No.1 Chinese developer community has launched its own SNS which might be a open widget platform too.
Shall we hail for it because a new era of Chinese Internet has come? Or should we worry about it and is it a bubble and a hype? Chinese web has embraced the Open concept, which is really positive move. I would rather believe the Open concept will be accepted by the industry and netizen soon one day. The question is what is after the Open Platforms?
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