Responses to “3 Reasons Why Tencent’s Qzone is a Failure”
Benjamin Joffe of +8* posted his complete commentary "Sorting Failure From Success in Social Networking | The Tencent Case" in response to our latest piece "3 Reasons Why Tencent’s Qzone is a Failure." Thanks to Benjamin Joffe for posting this!
While the overall success of Tencent as a company is pretty obvious, our friends from Blogger Insight took the specific case of Tencent’s SNS properties Qzone, QQ Campus and Xiaoyou to see how they were performing. Their conclusion is that Tencent pretty much failed at SNS. Our take is less conclusive. Read the full piece here.
The piece was also cross-posted to ChinaWebRadar, where it sparked some lively comments:
You cannot review the aesthetics of a chinese website from a westerner perspective. ...Yes it is buggy though
Good title bait, but flawed supporting points. If hundreds of millions of email accounts, high brand awareness, complementary sites, and government/ regulatory relations were all “awesome” resources for building a social network, then we would expect Google’s, MSN. Yahoo, and MSN to have built the world’s top SNS.
Interesting approach and some valuable data in your post.
That said, overall I think that QQ – much more than QZone or any other Tencent property – IS the SN. SNs are about connecting people, and QQ does that possibly better than any other web service on Earth, with Twitter being right there with it (yes, I thought deeply about that last statement). Sure Kaixin001 and RenRen are much closer to Facebook, but that in my mind doesn’t make them a better SN.
The Tencent piece was also discussed on This Week in Asia Episode 21: This Week in China starting at 26:30 into the podcast.
Kai Lukoff is an analyst at BloggerInsight and an editor on China Social Games. Follow Kai on Twitter @klukoff