douban.com - An Innovative Chinese Social Website(1)

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:08:00 -0800

Hi everyone! It's the second post of WEB 2.0 in China, a blog about Chinese WEB 2.0 site and start-ups. I will start a series to introduce to you a great Chinese website, douban.com.

In the first part, I will give you a general view of douban.com and you will find how this website differs from other web 2.0 site in China.

Two Screenshot

Here is a screenshot of douban's homepage:

With web achieve, we can find that douban.com started during March in 2005. Here is a screenshot of douban.com's homepage on March 12, 2005:

What is douban.com?

If you cannot read Chinese, you can use Google Translate to translate the homepage of douban.com. But Google Translate is not smart enough. In one word, Douban is a place for you to discover the most suitable books, movies, music, activities, blogs and anything else.

In first view, you may think douban.com is simply a book review site. From the screenshot of the 2005 version of douban.com, we know thatdouban.com was really a book review site in its first release. You can find books, read/write book review, and compare the price of the book in different e-book stores. The price comparison is one way douban makes profit. But now douban is known for its AI and its users. Once you register a douban account, input some information and find you friend on douban, you will get your personal douban homepage. In this page, you can see douban recommending books, movies, music, review and activities to you. After you searching some books or music, the recommend list will be more suitable to you. Then, you will love it.

Douban has huge amount of users in China and they are loyal. It has a lot of active users and most of them are educated people. I will discuss the culture of douban.com later.

At the end of this part, I will show you the trend of douban.com from Google Website trend:

TO BE CONTINUED...

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A 30-day English tweet challenge and this blog

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:10:00 -0800

The famous Googler Matt Cutts always had a 30-day challenge, including 30-day no-Scoble, 30-day no-Windows and 30-day no-iPhone. Recently, Louis Gray also had a 30-day challenge. He tried to use cloud service in 30 days. These challenges are cool. So when I started to tweet in English for 3 days, I decided to have a 30-day only-English tweet challenge! From Feb 16 and the following 30 days, I will tweet in English. Only English. My twitter is @lookon, and you can check my tweet :-)

I'm also a blogger and I like posterous very much. Posterous is a cool service and I just mail anything to it. Inspired by the 30-day no-Chinese challenge and my rencent talk with a Germen researcher at SJTU, Carsten Ullrich, I decided to write a blog in English about Chinese WEB 2.0 service and start-ups. Because I am accustomed to this topic and maybe people outside world would like to know about these information. I wish you can have a general view of Chinese WEB 2.0 by reading my blog and know the trending of Chinese web scene. Also, I will introduce some new Chinese web start-ups, and you may have interest.

This is the first blog post of "WEB 2.0 in China", and you can subscribe this blog to keep up-to-date with Chinese WEB 2.0. Enjoy

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