As if the upcoming RenRen IPO wasn’t enticing enough, “China’s Facebook” has sweetened the pot with the launch of its own LinkedIn-like social networking site aimed at Chinese professionals. Dubbed Jingwei, the beta site launched as an invitation-only network, but recently opened up to the public. Media reports indicate it features LinkedIn’s core functions including Profiles, Connections, Groups and Companies.
“The private beta version is still a bit buggy, even some core features such as Search are not working properly yet,” TechNode’s Gang Lu wrote recently. “But looking at its menu, it’s more or less like Linkedin.”
Better yet, Jingwei has an integrated question and answer component that’s drawn inspiration from Palo Alto-based Quora.com. Quora allows users to post and answer questions, vote answers up or down and collaborate to provide the best responses.
Jingwei plans to host “Company Day” events starting this month. The online-only gatherings will allow employees from global Fortune 500 companies to ‘mingle’ on designated pages on the site, according to spokesperson Shu Wei.
Interestingly, China doesn’t have a truly dominant player in the professional social networking space. LinkedIn itself claims 1 million active users in China, and the country’s current domestic leader, UShi, is barely a year old. UShi’s growth looks promising, but the site currently ranks as the 900th most popular site in China (per Alexa). LinkedIn, on the hand, ranks as the 230th most popular site in the People’s Republic. By combining the functionality of LinkedIn and Quora, Jingwei might be able to poach a nice chunk of traffic from its competitors.
Why buy into a RenRen IPO?
Even without Jingwei, there are several reasons to get excited about RenRen’s upcoming IPO. For one, the company could be the first major social networking site in the world to start trading on U.S. exchanges. My gut says any investor in the country looking for exposure to the social networking space will buy in – no matter how preposterous the company’s valuation.
RenRen’s also operating the most popular social networking site in the world’s largest Internet market. The site currenctly claims 160 million members. That’s nowhere near Facebook’s 600+ million, but there are indications that RenRen’s done a better job of monetizing the traffic it does get. While Facebook lets brands and companies create “fan pages” for free, for example, RenRen charges brands upwards of $90,000 to create their own “mini-sites,” according to Inventorspot. The student, it seems, might finally be outshining the master.
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Tags: Facebook, Facebook IPO, Jingwei, Quora, RenRen
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