Last week Piper Jaffray managing director Safa Rashtchy highlighted the argument that Facebook's over 15,000 applications have been able to attract new users momentarily, but have little ability keep users entertained. As a Chinese Facebook user myself, I totally agree with Rashtchy. In fact, it is exactly the endless flow of increasingly insane applications that has caused me to begin falling out of love with Facebook. That, and the continuous stream of friend requests coming in under my ever adjusted privacy settings.

While it is not a homegrown creation, Facebook is relatively popular in China. But I still can't help but feel that it is not well suited to the Chinese market. More goal-oriented dating sites and interest-oriented forum and chat tools seem better adapted to Chinese users more interested in making real connections than messing around with strangers. The fact that successful models are relative to their location can be noted by comparing the daily reach of Korean SNS site Cyworld in Korea (Graph 1) and Europe (Graph 2).

Graph 1

Graph 2


Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company recently announced its intention to exit the European market.

China is full of Facebook copycats: Wang Xing's Xiaonei, Pang Shengdong's 51.com and Zhang Fan's Zhanzuo just to name a few. Though his version of SNS is far from innovative, Wang Xing himself noted that, the "US market is very different from China" and "it will take years of patience to build up a Chinese-style SNS model." Wang went on to point out that Tencent's (0700.HK) IM chat tool QQ remains a competitive threat to SNS makers.

Given the situation, I suppose it's less ironic that Facebook is best translated as "you must die" when pronounced phonetically in Chinese (Fei Si Bu Ke).