Renren
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | China, December 2005 |
| Founder | Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang |
| Headquarters | Beijing, PR China |
| Area served | China |
| Industry | Social network service |
| Website | http://renren.com |
| Advertising | Banner ads, Referral marketing |
| Registration | Required |
| Available in | Chinese language |
| Current status | Active |
The Renren Network (Chinese: 人人网; literally "everyone network"), formerly known as Xiaonei Network (Chinese: 校内网; literally "on-campus network") is a Chinese social networking site with an interface similar to that of Facebook. It is popular among college students in China.
According to Xiaonei, as of July 2008, Xiaonei was "China's largest online community website among universities" with more than 22 million active users and an estimated 40 million users who have registered their real names. Thus, Xiaonei is widely considered to be the most powerful student social network service in Mainland China, especially among university students. In March 2008, Xiaonei started its WAP version, which users can get access to through mobile phones. [1]. Xiaonei has been advantaged in that it features an instant messaging service (Xiaoneitong, Chinese: 校内通) designed typically for its users, while Facebook was denounced to have dropped behind Xiaonei in this field. [2]
In August 2009, Xiaonei officially changed its name to Renren, as well as its domain to www.renren.com. The html title for the website is currently "Xiaonei Renren Network" to ease the transition period.
Contents |
[edit] History
Xiaonei was started in December 2005 by Tsinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Tang Yang. In October 2006, Xiaonei.com was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet consortium that created a similar college social network called 5Q. Wang left Xiaonei in July 2007. At present, Xiaonei has become the major SNS among college students in China.
[edit] Open Platform
In July 2007, Xiaonei officially facilitated its Open Platform, allowing the 3rd party to integrate with platform by rendering modifications and adding functionalities. The APIs Xiaonei listed are quite similar with those Facebook provided, and some of the developers of Xiaonei are developing based on the SDK of Facebook.[3][4][5]
[edit] Privacy policy
Xiaonei has a privacy policy to preserve the personal information. Different privacy levels for profile, contact info and blogs can be modified in the privacy settings, thus others that fail to match the privacy requirements cannot browse the specific information or contents of a given user.
In April 2008, SoftBank bought a 14% share of Xiaonei, making its largest shareholder. As a result, a rumor came out that “the personal data of millions of Chinese college students on Xiaonei will be exposed to the Japanese since the Japanese company became the boss of Xiaonei". Soon, such claim was spread all over various popular forums, QQ groups, and social networking sites like Xiaonei. Later, Xiaonei declared the denouncement towards its rivals for slander and denied what had been described in the rumor. [6]
[edit] Functions
Xiaonei is a typical SNS with a variety of functions with its own characteristics. It can be witnessed frequently updated, when the system’s functionalities requires rectification and further development, causing some of its functions blocked or partially limited.
[edit] Profile
As Xiaonei mainly caters for college students, the key information to make one’s identity effective is college, high school, middle school and hometown. At present, 32,000 universities and colleges, 56,000 high schools and 85,000 companies in China and 1,500 universities in 29 other countries are available on Xiaonei’s confirmation system. The social networks for each of these specified colleges, schools and companies have been established. In the additional section of personal profiles, users can also put on information about their contact information, hobbies, favorite music, movies, the clubs the joined, etc. To personalize the profile, xiaonei has also developed functions to edit profile music and background.
[edit] Friends
A registered user can constantly add old or newly-acquainted friends to the friend list. By specifying the educational information in the profile, a user may easily find other users that tally with his/her intention; correspondingly, the user may be searched by others with the similar intention. High school or college students are prone to find this advantageous when searching friends. Users can be also affiliated with groups of established titles (usually an existent class, school or organization).
[edit] Applications and censorship
There are some common kinds of expressions on Xiaonei, such as renewing the mood (lit. updating personal state), blogging, voting and sharing others’ blogs. Besides, users upload photos, share photos and external links (usually videos). Leaving a message or commenting any of a photo, blog, state, etc. is quite commonly seen; the interacting users leaving and replying the messages is considered a prominent instance of basic communication on Xiaonei. Activities can be held online by calling on friends to participate. There are also several peripheral applications, such as online mini games, regular games, doggies, testing, parking lot, selling and buying of friends.
However, Xiaonei’s censorship is fairly strict, especially to sensitive keywords in the blogs, compared with other SNS websites in China. Blogs containing keywords like (view source) cannot be released. Others that are suspicious or in possible relation to political topics, obscenity and thrillers, have to be manually censored by the administrators before they are released; this may postpone the blog to be exposed to online friends, and sometimes the blog may be blocked.
[edit] Xiaoneidou
The Xiaoneidou, or Xiaonei bean (校内豆), is the virtual currency on Xiaonei. Due to some functions charging users fees, Xiaoneidou can be used to purchase gifts, commence the Purple Bean service (紫豆服务), exchange for game coins and advertise. 1 RMB yuan is equivalent to 1 Xiaoneidou.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] References
- Xiaonei: Just Another Networking Brigade, University of Southern California US-China Institute, 2007-07-10.
- University-Born Online Communities Enter New Battlefield, BeijingReview.com, 2007-11-27.
