Facebook to sue Xiaonei next?

According to Financial Times, Facebook is filing a law suit against German facebook clone StudiVZ. There is some coverage in Insidefacebook and Techcrunch.

The interesting question brought up by Insidefacebook is that, will facebook sue the Chinese clone Xiaonei next? Clearly, in terms of clone, Xiaonei is a better one. There is even no "replacing Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one".
The question is, why didn't facebook sue xiaonei first? My guess is that, first, China's copyright law isn't as perfect as US, so maybe facebook doesn't want to get itself in trouble. Second, there is rumor saying that facebook has been blocked in China, due to it's highly opened platform and potential sensitive information. It doesn't sound like a good idea to mess with it by suing a Chinese competitor. Google and Baidu's battle could be a good example. Pretty much everyone agreed that Baidu plays an important role in the block of Google back to several years ago. Third, Xiaonei do have some features designed for Chinese market that facebook doesn't have, so maybe legally it's a little harder to approach the lay suit.

If like people said, you should always sue where the money is, Xiaonei is definitely a better option. They have raised $430 million this year, which seems a bigger number than StudiVZ's price(€100M). So it's likely Xiaonei will be the next target.

Or, maybe here facebook is sending a message to the rest clones: behave, otherwise I'm gonna go after you. Or...will facebook deal with it by acquiring Xiaonei? well...just a wild guess.

Xiaonei Apps vs Facebook Apps

A few days ago, Xiaonei, the most successful Chinese copy of facebook(so far) launched their developer platform. As social times reported, they kicked off an application competition with a total of 300,000 RMB, which is around $40,000(According to the official website, The first gets 100,000RMB, 5 second prize share 100,000RMB, and 10 third prize share another 100,000RMB). There is no doubt that Xiaonei's move is a smart move. They've been copying all facebook's feature so far except developer platform. It's now under the testing phase, and will become public in late June. In order to make your apps available by people, currently you need to apply for a permit.

Now, It's really interesting to get into Xiaonei to see what's out there. As a native Chinese, let me show you some of the apps I discovered. As you may already thought about, yes, it's pretty much a copy competition of the Facebook apps.

There are two copies of Rockyou's famous app "Likeness".





The basic idea is to send survey to friends to say their similarity.

Another popular copy is 6waves's 型男vs索女(cute boys vs pretty girls). Potentially this is quite possible to be popular in Xiaonei, because a lot of the xiaonei user's use it to find date, or to the simplest, to find pretty boys and girls.








Something funny here is, the above app even copies 型男vs索女's user profile as in their front page. The girl currently ranks No.1 in 型男vs索女.

For a long time, I don't really like people copy stuff from US to China, from Google(Baidu), to Youtube(Tudou, Youku), to Facebook(Xiaonei), to Twitter(Fanfou). However, time proves that they do work in China. Let's see what will happen this time. I guess it will pretty much become a competition of speed, a game that who copies fast, who wins.

I know there are many people in China, many of my friends, who are innovative, who are willing to do innovation. I hope they could do something to surprise the world, maybe next time. Let's fight!