A Safari Through China’s Social Web

I’ve been exploring the Chinese social web from here in Uganda. With the aid of translate.google.com, a few Firefox translation extensions and my own knowledge of PHP and HTML, I’ve managed to do pretty well. How does knowing a little code help? Well often at the bottom of these sites, you’ll find that the link structure uses common English terms like ’settings’, ‘login’ and ‘pass’. Just knowing how to look, where to look and when to look saved a lot of time.

My experiment was to prove that despite the fact that someone knows zero Chinese, a good user interface design will still allow them to create accounts on some of the largest Chinese social networking websites and successfully communicate. None of these sites have translations into any other language at all, and a few of them use code that couldn’t be parsed by Google because they used iframes or Ajax. This definitely made things trickier. Still, I forged ahead and here are the sites I visited.

Foxmail

My first step was to get a Foxmail account. Much like Gmail or Hotmail, it was incredibly easy to create an account on Foxmaill which was extremely intuitive and easy to configure. Most e-mail applications use similar layouts so no surprise here.

Zhanzuo

Zhanzuo is like the Facebook or MySpace of China. It authenticates accounts based on information about which University users attend. Until your account is ‘verified’ you can only browse the most basic features of the site. Attempting to do anything else just results in this message which I translated to mean “Your name has not yet passed examination and approval. Cannot use this feature”.

So, while I couldn’t fully explore the site, I was able to find a “status” area that resembled Twitter and Facebook’s status messages. An area for sharing Photos, Music and Video. Pretty much the typical social networking fare.

QQ

This is probably the biggest ’social network’ in China. It’s owned by a huge Chinese telecom, Tencent, who have built numerous web properties around their brand. To use those properties, however you need something called QQ-ID, essentially a phone number that becomes your identity online, it also activates your QQ mail account. While I was trying to figure out how to get a QQ-ID, I came across this post which spells it all out for English speakers. Perfect. Unfortunately, registration still didn’t work. I tried 5 or 6 times to no avail.

After googling through a few different forums, I discovered that during peak hours new user registration often doesn’t happen because of the heavy load on servers. It was 10pm in Beijing at the time, so I waited until 4am, Beijing time, and I got in on the first try.

Another interesting thing was that QQ has IP recognition enabled that allowed them to know that I’m in Uganda. They then offered to set my language to Swahili, something I quickly changed to English. Still, it’s cool that they accommodate foreign languages. They also had all of the the many regions of Uganda listed, which is just flat out incredible (that the Chinese recognize the African market enough to even bother). I’ve never been to an American or European social network that asked me if I lived in Busia…let alone one that knew where on the face of the earth it was! This is an application that’s attempting to make itself accessible to the whole world, no matter how remote and obscure the place.

For anyone interesting in chatting, my QQ Id is 858793910

I also set up my QQ Mail account although, for whatever reason, QQ wants you to wait 14 days before you can begin using POP3. This is annoying as I actually had planned to use it for some tasks but if I have to visit the website each time, it becomes more of a hassle than it’s worth.

IM QQ

With my QQ-ID I was able to do a lot of things I wasn’t able to do before. I decided to download the QQ Desktop Client for OSX which I found here.

Fortunately, IM QQ is now supported by Gaim so I can use it with Adium and I don’t have to use a separate chat client.

TaoTao

TaoTao is China’s answer to Twitter so I knew I had to check it out. Luckily I had just received my QQ-ID which the service uses to authenticate users. I don’t know if it’s the normal thing or not but a number of the Chinese social networks want users to use mobile numbers as their ID instead of email. (update 06.06: Something I’ve since borrowed for Status.ug). After acquiring the QQ Id TaoTao was easy to figure out without translating. In two minutes I had uploaded a picture and was Tao’ing away! My first message (Using Google Translate) was “???????,???????,?????Blogger ?” or “My name is Jon I’m a programmer, software developer and blogger.”

I did hit a hurdle, though. After a few seconds my profile was no longer active and I couldn’t post anymore. It seems TaoTao wants it’s users to activate by replying to an instant message sent through IM QQ. After sending a short message to the service, I was allowed to continue using the site just I had before.

Although it was time consuming trying to find my way past rows of characters that made no sense to me, I feel vindicated in proving that I could do it. Good design is universal and although I didn’t understand half of the symbols on my screen, I got the basics which allowed me to at least communicate to people using nothing but the web applications at my disposal. Why? Because with all that China is doing in Africa these days, it often seems like a one-way conversation. However, if it’s possible to participate at all with the Chinese via the web and social media, it opens up a potential dialog that may extend beyond the screen.

Will I continue using these Chinese tools? Yes. I dig quite a bit Foxmail (the title is sexy) and my QQ mail will be cool for joining newsgroups and discussion forums. IM QQ is useful for keeping in touch with Chinese people not using Skype or IM. TaoTao and ZhanZuo I doubt I’ll use much after this but I’ll keep my accounts open in case I need to. It was fun to see how the Chinese are doing social media, and to see where they’re innovating (using a mobile number as social identity is a really smart model).

If you notice, at the top of this blog there is a row of flags that translate this blog into a number of languages. For instance, clicking this link translates the blog into Chinese and this link offers the headlines in Chinese. While the translations are weak at best, they allow people from all over the globe to do what I did…get the basic idea of a conversation and communicate despite the barriers.

For anyone interested in getting in touch to follow up on this article or anything I’m now QQ858793910 , TaoTao.com/858793910 and jongos – at – foxmail.com

Note: This post was updated on 06.06.09 for spelling and grammar.