An other reference, the share price of Sina in NASDAQ have soared last Saturday along with the launch of this LBS product.

know more here.
West,foursquare got new features! new explore button on navigation bar, new search function base on different spot categories,and new tips display and push system. will foursquare be more and more Gowalla or yelp style? it reminds me about dianping.com in China.

Know more about this.

Everyone knows that if you want to reach a lot of people fast, going digital is a good bet. But in China, the odds are even better. Boasting the largest Internet community in the world with over 420 million online users, China’s online community has shown steady double-digit user growth rates over the past five years.

The rapidly increasing growth of online is no surprise. The digital landscape provides a virtual playground of activity as a one-stop shop to satisfy entertainment, information, communication and business needs—all at the touch of our fingertips. In China, users are partial to listening to music, catching up on the latest news, using the Internet as a search tool to research a topic, connecting with friends, family or colleagues through instant messaging and playing enjoying online games and virtual experiences.

The consumer-generated media (CGM) environment is making great strides in China. More than half of all online Chinese users regularly blog and use social media to voice their opinions about entertainment, relationships, sports, politics, technology—you name it. One-third of users partake in online discussion forums and BBS (bulletin board) sites.

Using online services to conduct business transactions is slowly taking shape and presents tremendous opportunity. Only Oone in three Chinese consumers use business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer commerce sites and 30% take advantage of convenient online payment and banking options. Only 15% use the Internet to trade stocks and funds and fewer than 10% book their travel online.

As consumers take advantage of the many and varied benefits that online provides, they are spending an increasingly significant amount of time behind an electronic device—be it a desktop computer, mobile phone, or personal device. The overwhelming majority of online users—about three-fourths—however, use a desktop as the preferred Internet device in China. Time spent online has grown gradually from 2001 until the middle of 2010 reaching an average of almost 20 hours per week.

Online Advertising Trends
Gaining share of mind continues to fragment in the media world and online advertising is taking an important place at the bargaining table. In fact, in the first three quarters of 2010, online advertising value reached almost 15M RMB—a 21% increase over the same time period in 2009. The advertising cycle shows peaks in the spring, summer, fall and during the Christmas season, but dips during the Chinese Spring Festival also known as Chinese New Year—the longest and most important of Chinese festivities, which always falls between January 21 and February 21.

Online ads for fashion, capturing 19.2% market share in the first nine months of 2010, is the top online advertising activity. Automotive ads follow closely behind with a 17.9% share of market. Ads for retail, computer/electrical and fast-moving consumer goods round out the top five online activities with the greatest market share. On the rise are online ads for manufacturer/wholesale products, community sites and energy/raw materials, which show the greatest year-on-year growth.

Keeping a Pulse
As the online landscape continues to mature and evolve, keeping connected with online audiences is not only critical, it is necessary for survival. As a pioneer in audience measurement business, Nielsen together with China Websites Ranking provides the first China online audience measurement to help navigate the world’s largest Internet community.

Nielsen China Forum: Go Digital in China

Sina has launched their open sources Weibo system-Xweibo, today. It’s a free system  which bases on Sina open API platform. After a few steps, Web developers can easily build a complete platform of microbolg system: just need to download Xweibo installation files and simply follow the official wizard to complete  the whole set up.  when this system landing on local server, it can perfectly provide basic functions such as tweet\retweet\reply\follow\massage and it also  supports additional functions and interface customization.

Check here for more info.

The majority of shared content, around 65% was major current news stories, 19% was breaking news and 16%was made up of quirkly news.

whitepaper_evolving_uses_of_social_media

Social identity:7 best practices for driving registrations

Enabling people to register using an existing identity from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo,
or other provider is one of the most powerful registration tools to emerge in the last
few years. Registering people through an established online identity not only
streamlines the registration process but also gives your business a head start on
building deeper relationships with them.
Social_Identity_Best_Practices_Gigya

Vancl a Chinese e-commerce clothing brand, has stepped into the real world. In the last few months, in Tier 1 cities (SH\BJ), Vancl has plastered billboard advertisements all over the walls of bustling subway and bus stops.

Han Han, famous controversial blogger, and TV star Wang Luo Dan is endorsing the brand and has attracted much buzz among netizens who are exchanging ideas and parodies online amongst themselves.

In these ‘parodies’, many celebrities and cartoon characters were “Photoshop-ed” as spokesperson with funny and interesting taglines. It became highly viral on Sina Weibo and netizens also launched an ATL campaign called ‘Let’s all tease Vancl’ on Douban, which registered 12,000 members in less than two weeks. Members of the group got together to do one thing: express what and who they love — ironic or real — through the Vancl ad campaign. The group members have already loaded 2,821 (and counting) variations of the ad campaign.

Chinese Internet users have always had an appetite for messing with pop culture. Think back to 2003 when a photo of middle school student nicknamed Xiaopang, was uploaded online and digitally transformed into various alter-egos. And this time, the Vancl ad has once again, stuck a chord with the online masses, spurring a “recreation movement” where netizens create their own narratives with commercially available materials.

This“new” function, which Baidu.com had done it million years ago, is saving 3.5 billion seconds for users perday.

Google Instant predicts search behaviour by suggesting and finishing keywords or phrases typed into the search box. And it’s also another great changce& challenge for SEO&SEM.

TechCruch:It appears that Foursquare hit the three million user mark sometime over the weekend. The location based social network has been adding users at impressive rates, and only hit 2 million users in early July. It took a year to reach one million; three months to hit 2 million, and a month and a half to hit 3 million.

Some thought Foursquare was doomed when Facebook rolled out its location-based feature, Places, a few weeks ago. In turns out that via the Places API, the feature serves as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. But Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley reported that Foursquare had its biggest day of signups following Facebook’s announcement. And Crowley told the LA Times recently that the startup is growing at about 180,000 users every 10 days.”

Full vision

Other interview for your references:

“Foursquare of China”: Interview with Jiepang Founder

18,August,Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Places at their headquarters in Palo Alto, California.  Facebook Places is a location-based check-in service that allows users to share where they are, find out where their friends are and discover places in their area. Users can also tag friends when they check in, something that other services do not currently offer. The service allows businesses to create or claim Places on Facebook and encourage users to check in. Eventually this could lead to the ability to offer discounts or promotional messages to users at a location or nearby.

During the announcement, Zuckerburg joked about all the features Facebook would not be integrating into the new platform.  However in a dazzling display of netizenship, Facebook decided to play nice with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booya (the makers of MyTown). While Facebook will continue to port over all your social good from the most popular location-based services, the impact on these competitors remains to be seen. According to the most recent Mashable poll.

Find this in RazorfishSearchShots

Additional references: Facebook Partnering With Gowalla And Foursquare For Places

Will RenRen\Kaixin001 or the most ambition guy QQ say hi to Jiepang\Xiami? or just another “dramatical difference” in China?