Renren, the NYSE-listed Chinese Facebook clone is currently inviting its users to test out a newly revamped site (V6.0) in an aim to make the bloated service less cluttered and help people get connected more easily.
After years of adding (or copying) new features, the site is rather inflated with a disparate set of services that inspired by various valley hotties, like its main premise Renren.com (apparently a tribute to Facebook), a Pinterest-like social ecommerce effort J.Renren.com and even a service resembles Tumblr, namely Renren Xiaozhan. So it’s not a surprise that Renren users got lost a lot while traveling the service.
In what could be seen as a big step forward to simplify its offerings, Renren debuted a new homepage with cleaner design and clearer focus on certain features (rather than promoting everything) like status updating, photo uploading and diary writing, a move to encourage and facilitate user-generated content.
Meanwhile, Renren again added something else to its arsenal. The new homepage hosted a new channel on its top navigation bar dubbed Explore, click through you’ll find a waterfall-wall that could well been adopted by hundreds of Chinese Pinterest clones. It seems the new channel will be used to showcase curated content published by Renren users across the site. To be honest, I’m getting tired of the layout no matter how nice it looks.