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Comment by treyp | Hacker News Reader

the lack of china is pretty interesting. russia is practically non-existent too, but it's much larger (especially with this map projection) with a much smaller population.

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The lack of China on the map was interesting to me as well. I believe that Facebook being blocked in China has quite a bit to do with it.

Not really. The real reason is 2 letters long: QQ

EDIT: To explain and not be snarky, QQ is an IM/portal/social network/web mail/social game platform that is actually larger than Facebook. (Over 600 million active last I checked.) They completely dominate every aspect of Chinese web software.

There would be many more using Facebook if it wasn't blocked. I'm not sure how it's doing now but I remember lots of students last year were joining xiaonei which is just a facebook duplicate for Chinese students only.

IMO many of these sites are blocked in China so Chinese companies can dominate the domestic market rather than for political reasons.

Not at all true. QQ is more akin to MSN than to Facebook (even though it tried to do social networking features, it did them late and poorly).

Facebook would be on this list if it weren't blocked in China: http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/07/china%E2%80%99s-top-4-soci...

China already has 2 indigenous Facebooks, Kaixin (targeted towards professional workers) and Renren (targeted towards college students). It also has QQ, which is more like MSN Messenger + MySpace + gaming.

Filtered or not, US web companies don't tend to do well in China. Amazon and eBay aren't filtered, for example, but they both completely flopped here. A lot of it has to do with US tech companies not understanding how (or being unwilling) to do business like Chinese.

How do the Chinese do business? And how is it different from how U.S. Tech companies do business?

Amazon and ebay need a lot more infrastructure than youtube/google/twitter and have therefore never really put in a big effort on China. I'm sure they aren't very successful in most developing countries. Those other ones would be competitive like they are everywhere else in the world if they had a chance.

Google was the one that really invested in China and though not in the same league as Baidu yet, it was definitely moving up in market share until the government turned hostile on them. They definitely "understood" how to do business in China: they had a big Chinese staff, they even had a music search like Baidu which surprised me because it seems like something RIAA would go nuts at, and they made their own very good pinyin input system.

I'm guessing if Amazon or ebay got successful and competitive with their players, China would suddenly notice some pro-Tibet book on there and use it as an excuse to give them the boot.

eBay does not actually need a lot of infrastructure in a new market (relatively)- int's all server based. Amazon is a another story, with their inventory approach requiring critical mass of warehousing close to market.

eBay are famous down here in New Zealand (at least with those that care) for believing that serving a dial-up market with heavy picture laden HTML from 200-300ms away and no local presence was going to work. A local start-up (Trade Me) destroyed eBay pretty quickly and has gone on to post better per person numbers than (I believe) any eBay affiliate. Same story in China. I say there are/were too many MBAs in eBay and not enough (especially local) tech-heads.

Meanwhile Skype is doing great things post eBay ownership.

L an ex Trade Me MBA. The only one at the time, and part time at that.

Russia primarily uses Vkontakte.

I'd suspect it's because people in China use proxies to evade the filter, and hence have non-Chinese IPs.

the data used is not based on IPs, but on user-submitted "current cities" instead, as mentioned in the blog post

Oh, huh. That's weird.

I wonder if Chinese Internet users for some reason think they'd be caught evading the filter if they put their actual city in their profile?

Or maybe his sampling method was just abysmal? ;)

Or maybe Chinese people just don't use Facebook.

Yes, I made that post before I saw what smokinn said about QQ. (And what others said about other Chinese social networking companies, and American companies in China, in general.)

also, brazil is still holding out for the most part. i wonder what the penetration rate of a social network needs to be in order for users to not jump ship to facebook?

I believe Brazil is heavily invested into orkut.

I wouldn't say Brazil is holding out, it's just that population is heavily concentrated on the southern coast. The northern parts of the country have a smaller, poorer population. It would probably be brighter if Orkut didn't exist, but the Amazon basin would still be completely dark.

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