Social networks: the China effect

I’ve just read about a very interesting development in the field of social networking: OpenBC is going to change its name to Xing. To quote Michael Specht, this is big. (He was talking about ebay pulling out about of China, but the reason is the same: China is changing everything).

I think this is a smart move of OpenBC. To put it into context, I’m a member of both OpenBC and of LinkedIn. I have paid membership of OpenBC, but not of LinkedIn. My experience is that OpenBC is much more flexible, and allows me to do more in terms of personal brand development and in-the-flesh networking, and its fee structure is affordable. On the other hand, its greater openess means I need to be rather more careful in selecting contacts, and agreeing to contact requests. LinkedIn’s greater stringency means it’s more difficult to connect with people that you don’t know, but it’s also less useful to me in practical terms – at least, with the free membership, but I find its fees to be a bit too high.

The other issue is the membership and future direction. Here in Singapore, I find that LinkedIn has lots of professional members, but not many people really use it, except for a few dedicated networkers – most of whom are on OpenBC as well. OpenBC has a broader, more diverse membership, but is more active in promoting offline events. In China, during my year there, I saw that LinkedIn is an irrelevance, whereas OpenBC was going ballistic, with lots of people joining, and lots of Chinese joining.

The secret is that OpenBC allows people to use their own language. Here are the system language options (ie, the languages users can use to operate their accounts):

• English
• German
• Spanish
• Italian
• Dutch
• Finnish
• Russian
• Hungarian
• Japanese
• French
• Portugese
• Swedish
• Chinese
• Korean
• Turkish
• Polish

Here are the languages you can use for LinkedIn:

• English

See? Of course, this means that if you only speak English, either network is OK. If you speak more than one language, OpenBC will give you a broader network. If you work in China, OpenBC is the only game in town.

I think this trend, to dominance in East Asia, must of course be even clearer to the OpenBC folks, hence the name change. As they say themselves, In China, for example, XING translates as ‘can do’ and ‘encounters’. Stowe Boyd, who has something to do with OpenBC but isn’t part of the management, has been trying to work out what the new name means. It’s xíng, second tone, meaning “You’re on”, “OK”, and is part of everyday speech, as in”xing ma? Xing!” – “Is that OK? It’s OK!”

Smart move by OpenBC, I say. By the way, I wonder why they aren’t offering Hindi or Tamil – especially as (IIRC) the Tamil community is extremely active online. I know they have people in India, so perhaps these options are coming….