I was reading the Toronto
Star on Thursday and came across an article called “Facebook eyes fight to
crack China China Xinjiang ,
China
The article went on to talk about how Facebook is late
getting into the Chinese social networking market since there are a number of
already very popular sites available to the public such as; Sina Corp, Renren
Inc, and Tencent Holdings to name a few. Of the 1.3 billion people in the
country, half of the 500 million internet users already use social networking
sites. According to Mr. Leung of CLSA, “It will be very difficult for Facebook to
introduce something that will allow them to differentiate themselves.” I
believe that Facebook will not have to differentiate themselves since if Facebook
brings a way for the Chinese to communicate with the rest of the world; the
users that were limited to Chinese only social networks may want to reach out
to the already 850 million users on Facebook.
It would be interesting to know how many Chinese students
who are studying in Canada
I was actually completely unaware that Facebook was banned in China. However, if Facebook could actually establish themselves legally in China it could greatly benefit the Social Networking site. With China boasting one of the largest populations in the world, Facebook's establishment could greatly increase the company's revenue. For a country to completely ban "Western" media I feel like it is trying to control its citizens. After all, if Al Jazeera was banned in North America, I would be denied access to some of the only REAL news we get in the world.
ReplyDeleteNo such thing as "REAL" news, just because one agrees to what you believe is happening in the world does not make it unbiased. Perspectives can make bank robbers look like saints and nuns look like demons.
DeleteJournalism requires perspective, and perspective is bias, not to even mention that good journalism has to be controversial and edgy, even if the truth is not...
Al Jazeera is not some underground news station it is powered by some serious money. News is powerful, it tells people how to think. Al Jazeera will never write an article that is contradictory to the interests of its board of directors, thus making it biased and very not real.
Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but these kinds of comments, about how a government or media mogul is not corrupt, comes of just plain gullible and ignorant to me... The people that run such powerful and wealthy positions did not get there by telling the truth and being nice...
It's very hard for tech companies to penetrate China. There are laws that really benefit Chinese competitors, some of which are state owned.
ReplyDeleteYou have to hire a certain amount of local developers, who usually get ridiculous offers from new Chinese companies after a year of working for the foreign tech company. They then leak all the secrets.
I forgot which site it was, but there was a case where a Chinese site basically ripped off a tech startup that was trying to set up in China to the point where the code was exactly the same (this was in Javascript so it's all open). The Chinese government did nothing, and because the site was local and there is a surprising amount of nationalism with Chinese 'netizens', the tech startup found it unprofitable to compete in China.
I think that's because there's already a social networking website in China that is very much popular with the Chinese population - like how facebook is very popular in the western world (like Baidu vs Google).
ReplyDeleteIf facebook is introduced in China, there might be competition between facebook and their own social networking website. This could be one of the reasons why China blocked them; or a larger picture: it would be Western organization vs Chinese organization.
- hikari-reizumi.livejournal.com (for some reason livejournal doesn't allow me to post automatically like last time)