Facebook for China

How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?

- Mark Zuckerberg

Saw another friend commented about this - Zuckerberg's strategy for China.

Well, I think both Google and Facebook has the potential to go into China's market, unless China starts to improve on the censorship and website quality (in terms of originality and service coverage).

Just my random thought, because I realized that most of my China friends are using Google services, and Facebook more often compare to Baidu or 人人网 (ren ren wang).

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Just thought of some problems that I think most local sites faced.

Limited user domain... the problem

The reason why all the (local) sites, not only Chinese sites, fails in the long run is because their user/data domain is too limited, too localized in other words. With advancement of internet, people wants more info, from around the world.

And with the overloaded information, people just want as few entry points (search engine, or portal) as possible to get them to want they want. This comes to a point, which website should we remember? There are so many web addresses out there...

Some people, like me, choose to remember only the major sites, and combine/integrate other sites into it. For example

• Google - to link me to other sites with "i'm feeling lucky". 
• Gmail - to check all other inboxes (Hotmail and Yahoo... got forwarded there), and to video call (replacing msn, and skype)
• Twitter - to communicate with tech friends.
• Facebook - to stay in touch with common friends (who already abandoned Friendster, MySpace...) 

Local (small) sites couldn't provide better service... in the long run

Take Gothere.sg for example, not sure how long the site can survive. I find that the service is good, and accurate when it just started few years back. But now, often, I'll double check my result with Google Maps, and most of the times, Google Maps returns better results. Maybe because lack of technology and expertise to further improve on the site?

Another interesting fact to know is that, Youtube wasn't that popular back in 2006. Until Google acquired it and start to "globalize" it. Google sees Youtube as a potential source of advertising revenue; While Youtube sees  Google as the source for their expansion - leveraging on their server technology and global reach. The outcome - good user experience makes Youtube a better choice compared to other local "media entertainment" platform.

Conclusion?

This makes me think that, the only way a site (especially local site) can survive, is to evolve rapid enough and not to be held back by geographical-limited user domain, and most important - server technology. If you going to stay at where you are, most likely, your company will be engulfed by other big company.

The different Facebook-wannabe sites :)