Reflections on Xiaonei.com and Facebook

I blogged about the news of Facebook's "intended acquisition" of Zhanzuo.com last month（http://blog.xiaonei.com/GetEntry.do?id=248183004&owner=980654458） and it seems to be a complete rumor. Facebook's speaksman have negated the acquisition and there is no further evidence or any clue about facebook's activity in China.

Recently I suddenly reflected that perhaps Xiaonei.com might have long been expecting to get acquired by Facebook...I have several reasons for the guess.

1.Xiaonei looks completely the same as Facebook, from the start to the end.

2.Xiaonei adopts nearly the same strategy as Facebook, and has successfully become the dominant SNS in Campus in China.

3.I guess the underlying structure of Xiaonei might be very similar with that of Facebook's.

4.So if Facebook acquire it, it would be much easier for them to re-install it, reconfigure it, integrate it with the original facebook, and to merge the Chinese users with the other parts of the world. And whenever they entered by acquisition, the market has been huge with large number of users after several years' efforts of Xiaonei.com. Therefore it would be a worthy deal for Facebook if they want to dominate the China Market as they do in the U.S. 

5.I don't know what does Xiaonei's CEO Chen Yizhou thinks...but it seems well reasonable for him to expect Xiaonei.com to be acquried by Facebook after these years large amount of funds devoted but without the hope of payoffs.

Let's wait and see.

However, we should also see that Xiaonei.com is still not as powerful as Facebook. College students use Facebook even in class dicussions. But what we ONLY do in Xiaonei.com is for gossips(at least I think so)...

A use of facebook can be seen from HBS Professor Andrew McAfee post in Facebook on the Intranet? No -- Facebook AS the Intranet, about Serena Software's employing Facebook as its intranet portal .

A comment from a Harvard professor Larry Bouthillier about his secure use of Facebook with self-developed platforms among Harvard students, very constructive.

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"Facebook integration like this is less scary than it may look at first glance.  At the risk of getting a little too geeky , let me explain. 

Facebook allows application developers to create their own apps that live inside an “iframe” within the Facebook site.  Whatever a company does within that iframed space is entirely their own secure environment, and can even have its own intranet login process just like the company portal.

For example, in the application my team built for Harvard students to see and interact with their course schedules and classmates in Facebook, that application uses the standard Harvard intranet login process, runs on a secure (SSL/https) connection, interacts securely with the Harvard directory services (LDAP) and email services, and Facebook never sees any Harvard-specific data about the users whatsoever. 

So, our app looks like Facebook’s screens—same styles, same way to display lists of people, same Facebook photos of users.  But it’s all generated by us to look that way. 

I suspect that WorkBook does something similar. The application does not live *inside* Facebook, it just appears that way.  It just happens to sit inside a Facebook iframe, and uses a few handy conveniences Facebook makes available (such as access to Facebook photos, friend lists, and messaging).

Ultimately, it can be as secure (or insecure) as any other intranet application. "

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Also you would see more discussions on the commercial use of Web2.0 (Enterprise 2.0), go to visit HBS professor Andrew McAfee @ http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/