Facebook With Chinese Characteristics

Facebook.com, for those of you who don\'t know, get someone in college to explain for you. Facebook has not expanded into other countries, leaving a very successful business model and idea to be picked up by other people here. The result is xiaonei.cn for those of you who want to look, and it is definitely facebook with Chinese characteristics.

The first thing you notice is that the colors are exactly the same as facebook, the menus in the same places and mean almost exactly the same thing. They have your personal page with your interests (爱好), music, contact info, etc. There is the wall, your list of friends and their pictures, your groups, events, etc. Its in the differences that xiaonei.cn becomes really interesting. The biggest difference, painfully evident upon visiting most people\'s pages, is that you can change the background of your page, adding a background picture and even music. Its quite amazing. You also have a \'blog\' that appears above your wall posts which some people use a little like a xanga, but others don\'t update. The other huge thing is that you can see how many people have looked at your page and who they are. For most people this is probably not that relevant, but then there are those people that aspire to the list of the most visited profiles. I saw a girl at beijing university (luckily the list isn\'t strictly ranked by numbers so you can\'t know for who has the most) who had 50,000 hits.

I started a xiaonei.cn profile, of course. All you need is a Chinese email address, which I got for free, not a college one. It\'s really fun to figure out the language on the site and type ridiculously simple wall posts.

In different news, last night was a Kareoke night, which is a perfect activity for kids who want to have fun but half don\'t want to drink (female roommates). We stayed out till 4, and because we\'re so far east that means the sun was rising, aiyah. But that did let me watch the first half of the Italy/Ukraine game. Today we\'re off to a big tourist park for a picnic lunch, tonight perhaps a massage, and then back to the books.