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Since 2009, most of the world’s famous social network sites are successively blocked within China. But as usual, if one service is no more accessible, a local alternative will start to emerge from the market.

What are the Chinese equivalents for the known social networks?

Social Network Site – Facebook type: RenRen and Kaixin001.

RenRen (人人网), previously called “XiaoNei”, started in May 1999 as an alumni system for the Chinese university students. The website works quite the same as Facebook, it reflects the real relationship of the students in Universities. XiaoNei provides to the students a platform to share contact information, send messages or organize events. The first requirement to have a XiaoNei account is that you must register with a university .edu email address, and limited to a block of IP address matching your school. This was the method XiaoNei used to assure that only students are in this network.

With the rise of Facebook, XiaoNei decided also to expand their service: in 2009, after years of the limitation on the students, XiaoNei decided to change the brand name to RenRen (direct translation: Everyone), and to remove this limitation and allow all people from the society to be able to create an account. The official reason for this is that most of the students have graduated and stepped into the society, and it’s more convenient for the graduated students to still log in to their XiaoNei account without this limit. But the real reason of this delimitation is that RenRen wishes to become a SNS serving the whole Chinese society, but not only to the students.

After the opening of the platform API, RenRen and other 3^rd party web application development companies have developed thousands of RenRen applications, including blogging, photo sharing, music and video sharing, and therefore, gained many new users. In 2010, the number of RenRen registered users has passed over 150 million. Read more »