四海为家

I like this overview of differences in Western and Chinese approaches to online social networking, posted on CNReviews. At first glance, Chinese social networking sites might seem pretty similar to Western ones. The profile page, newsfeed and even blue layout of Xiaonei (“on campus” — which recently changed its name to “人人网”, but is still generally referred to as “校内”, or Xiaonei) in particular looks suspiciously similar to the blue layout of one very popular American social networking site. But social networking here in China is by no means a carbon copy of its Western equivalent, as I discovered when I set up my own profiles on Xiaonei and QQ (which is by far the most popular online messenger service in China, and along with a slew of other services hosts a popular social networking site). I think this is a really interesting topic, and warrants a longer-than-usual blog post.

CNReviews identifies four main differences between Western and Chinese social networking patterns:

1) Focus on entertainment — Chinese “netizens” use social networking sites primarily as a source of entertainment (illustrated for example by the Happy Farm phenomenon), while Western users tends to see social networking sites more as a tool for staying in touch with friends. My thoughts on this one: anecdotally, this holds true for me, but given how many games and applications there are on facebook nowadays, I’m not sure if this really is a big cultural difference. I personally suspect that in the West, there’s a generational divide — my age group, people who maybe had accounts on Facebook back in the day when there weren’t any games, see these sites more as a way of keeping in touch with (or stalking) friends, but my younger sister definitely makes use of all the apps and games that Facebook has to offer. If this hypothesis holds true, maybe China just doesn’t have the equivalent to my generation — there were games here from the start, so even people in their late 20s use these sites largely as a way to have fun online.

2) Higher tolerance for intrusiveness — according to CNReviews, extra applications, pop-ups and email reminders that Western users would see as annoyances or spam are instead popular among Chinese users, and help drive people more people onto these sites. I personally haven’t noticed much “spam” from these sites, but I definitely find Chinese social networking sites cluttered relative to my own preferences, something I’ve always attributed to different aesthetic preferences (see point 5 below).

3) Social networking sites as a public space — this is the difference that resonates the most with me, to me this seems like the biggest divide between Chinese and Western social networking. In the West we tend to see our list of friends on social networking sites as an online representation of our real-world network, whereas in China it seems much more common to create new networks online. In the US, it never would have occurred to me to add someone I had never met as a facebook friend, and I only very occasionally got requests from people I didn’t know, whereas here I get these friend requests all the time (and if I have no idea who the person is, I always turn down the request, maybe that’s a cultural faux-pas). When I had just opened my first “Happy Farm” and didn’t have anyone to steal vegetables from, another friend suggested that I add some online contacts — in his opinion, adding anyone from Wuda (a university with more than 50,000 students) was definitely fair game, but really anyone at all would do. I convinced my roommate to start a farm instead.

4) Building an online identity — the final difference that CNReviews highlights is that Chinese users see their profile as their face to the online world, and put a lot of effort into shaping their identity online — to the point of being willing to pay real money for clothes or jewelery for their networking avatar. Apparently Tencent, the company that owns QQ, makes lots of money from these micropayments. I’ve always been curious about who would be willing to pay real-world money for internet-world goods, like a dog to guard your Happy Farm, but apparently many people view their profiles as so important that they’re willing to make investments to make sure the person the profile presents to the online world is the person they want to be. It would be interesting to see more research on this phenomenon — I wonder how much of the difference comes from consumer preferences, and how much of it comes simply from differences in business models chosen by the big players in the social networking world in China vs the US (which in turn may have shaped consumer expectations of whether or not they should be driven to spend money on these sites).

In my forays into the Chinese online world, I’ve been struck by a few more differences between Chinese and Western social networking worlds:

5) Aesthetics — Chinese websites in general seem to love clutter — the more stuff on the page, the better — while Western websites seem to favor a more minimalist look that directs the eye to the most important parts of the page. This is true for websites in general, but it’s especially obvious for social networking sites. Just take a look at the difference between QQ for China and QQ for foreigners. For an example of what this looks like for a regular company, here’s the website of the place I work part-time.

6) Privacy — on Xiaonei, you can see who has visited your profile and when they were there. For me, this is a strong disincentive to browsing other people’s profiles, but my friends don’t seem to mind this feature. In fact, when I have browsed someone’s profile (for example if I follow a link from their minifeed), within a few hours I tend to get a friendly message saying hi and acknowledging that the person knows I’ve recently been on his/her profile page. It seems like people here see this feature as another way of connecting with friends. If it were introduced to facebook, I suspect people would start leaving in droves.

7) Being online at work — I don’t want to imagine the number of work-hours lost to Facebook in the US, but in China it seems not only more acceptable to spend your workday on sites like Xiaonei, the messenger service QQ also seems to have become an essential communication tool in many companies. One friend, who works 9 to 5 and seems to be online 24/7, told me that he uses QQ to communicate with his colleagues, and MSN to communicate with his boss (sometimes I meet people who have MSN accounts because they think that’s what foreigners have, and they want to try to make foreign contacts — maybe that’s the case with my friend’s boss). And this doesn’t just apply to white-collar jobs — when I go to buy my milk tea, the people who make the tea are always glued to the computer screen next to the jars of tea leaves, and when I bought my train ticket this morning, I heard the familiar “knock-knock” sound of someone logging into QQ coming from the computer that my tickets were being pulled up on. Not all of this time spent online is procrastination (or even just network-building). A lot of companies have incorporated the QQ messenger service (not social networking per se, but related) into their customer service. It’s often possible to make travel reservations, book dinner or ask questions about a product through QQ, and businesses often print their QQ number (QQ users generally have a number rather than a username) along with other contact information in advertisements or on business cards. Using QQ as a business tool is probably good for productivity, but spending time taking care of your Happy Farm is probably not — it’s hard to know what the net impact of incorporating online networking and messenger services has been on productivity.

CNReviews concludes their piece by asking what Western social networking sites looking to break into the Chinese market would have to change in order to appeal to Chinese users. Given that most of these sites (like Facebook and Twitter) are currently blocked in China, it seems like the first step isn’t to appeal to the Chinese user, but to appeal to the Chinese government — which might require making concessions that these sites aren’t (and shouldn’t be) willing to make.

If and when they do become accessible again, I think that to get a piece of the Chinese social networking market, the best route might be to stay foreign. I’ve met lots of people who opened Facebook profiles before the site was blocked as a way to practice their English, and maybe also because they liked the way the site is designed. Trying to become QQ and take over that market is probably a lost cause at this point, but there might still be a significant niche of users who like Facebook and other similar sites just the way they are — because of, and not in spite of, the differences.