Russian Exact Copy of Facebook

China has at least two copies. of those I remember, faceren.com and xiaonei.com.

one of them was sold for around 5M iirc. The concept works, the entry barrier is low, being copied is inevitable unless you move very fast.

This isn't a bad thing imo though; the local dev teams understand local culture better. faceren and xiaonei both looked like carbon copies of facebook when I saw it on TechCrunch (or something). If you look at faceren now it's completely different.

I wonder what the mindset is of someone who duplicates--exactly--not only the functionality, but everything down to the layout and color scheme. It doesn't seem that this kind of venture is going to penetrate very far, especially outside of Russia. Then again, the recent article posted about Friendster mentions they are focusing on smaller Asian countries (Malaysia, etc). I guess this is the web equivalent of a niche company: trading potential success for potential market safety.

It's written in Russian, but pretty much everything is the same. From the "Wall" feature, to posting of pictures, Groups, ETC. They did add a little bit of new features, but not much.