In a follow up to an earlier post about a Chinese version of popular US university social networking site Facebook.com, it has been confirmed that the Chinese site, Xiaonei.com, has no relation to Facebook and is just a copy of the US site.

Received the news from China Web2.0 Review, which says it learned from Xiaonei founder Wang Xing that the site has no relation to the original Facebook.

China Web2.0 Review said it best: "I just cannot understand why they donÂ?t even put [an] effort [into designing] their own website, is it so difficult to do so?"

I said in the previous post that Xiaonei is an almost exact copy of the Facebook site. I included some screenshots below comparing the sites. This is the original Facebook website:



This is Xiaonei's site, taken Monday:



Xiaonei may have felt their site was a little too similar to Facebook, because it appears they have made a slight change to it since Monday. This third screen shot is Xiaonei's site on Thursday. They have removed a small icon of a guy in the top left corner of the site that was taken from Facebook. So now does it count as an original design?