Renren

Renren Network, 人人网; literally "everyone network", formerly known as Xiaonei Network, 校内网; literally "on-campus network") is a Chinese social networking site that is a copy of Facebook. It has been called the Facebook of China. It is popular among college students in China. In Feb 2011, Renren made a pre-IPO announcement that it had 160 million registered users. Then in April 2011, it had to modify that statement to "a total of 31 million active monthly users.

History

Xiaonei was started in December 2005 by University of Delaware graduates Wang Xing, Tsinghua University graduates Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Tang Yang.. In October 2006, Xiaonei.com was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a Chinese Internet consortium that created a similar college social network called 5Q. Wang left Xiaonei in July 2007.

In March 2008, Xiaonei launched its WAP version, which users can access through mobile phones.Xiaonei features an instant messaging service (Rénrénzhuōmiàn, Chinese: 人人桌面) designed typically for its users, which is more popular than Facebook chat.

In August 2009, Xiaonei officially changed its name to Renren, as well as its domain to www.renren.com. This name change from 'inside the school' (Xiaonei 校内) to 'everybody' (renren 人人) reflected the expansion aspirations held by Oak Pacific - No more a network dedicated to students but the biggest Chinese social network website, which spreads throughout the society.

In April 2011, the company filed with the SEC to raise $584 million in a US IPO, offering Renren stocks in the New York Stock Exchange. The company reported 2010 revenue of $76 million USD.

May 4, 2011 Renren prices IPO at $14, high end of revised range. 

Open Platform

In July 2007, Xiaonei officially facilitated its Open Platform, allowing the 3rd party to integrate with platform by rendering modifications and adding functionalities. The APIs Xiaonei listed are quite similar with those Facebook provided, and some of the developers of Xiaonei are developing based on the SDK of Facebook.

Privacy Policy

Renren has a privacy policy to preserve personal information. Different privacy levels for profile, contact info and blogs can be modified in the privacy settings, thus others that fail to match the privacy requirements cannot browse the specific information or contents of a given user.

In April 2008, SoftBank bought a 14% share of Xiaonei, making its largest shareholder. As a result, a rumor came out that “the personal data of millions of Chinese college students on Xiaonei will be exposed to the Japanese since the Japanese company became the boss of Xiaonei". Soon, such claim was spread all over various popular forums, QQ groups, and social networking sites like Xiaonei. Later, Xiaonei declared the denouncement towards its rivals for slander and denied what had been described in the rumor. 

Privacy Leakage April 2011

On April 29, 2011 a number of Renren users received a personal message saying that there's someone loving you, along with a piece of malicious code, providing the user's ID, name, school, birth date, cell-phone number, MSN, etc. to a third-party website. Such personal message exploited a bug of Renren and a built-in automatic-forwarding feature. So a great number of users was affected. On the next day, such news was reported by major IT news websites in China but those articles were miraculously removed. Only a series of screenshots, a short statement and a piece of attacking code survived. The community has criticized Renren's reaction towards this event. They did not clarify what happened to its users or to the media, but tried to delete the data and also made use of its public relationship team to delete the posts on every IT news websites. This is probably related to its recent IPO filing.

Functions

Xiaonei is a typical SNS with a variety of functions with its own characteristics. It can be witnessed frequently updated, when the system’s functionalities requires rectification and further development, causing some of its functions blocked or partially limited.

Profile

As Xiaonei mainly caters for college students, the key information to make one’s identity effective is college, high school, middle school and hometown. At present, 32,000 universities and colleges, 56,000 high schools and 85,000 companies in China and 1,500 universities in 29 other countries are available on Xiaonei’s confirmation system. The social networks for each of these specified colleges, schools and companies have been established. In the additional section of personal profiles, users can also put on information about their contact information, hobbies, favorite music, movies, the clubs the joined, etc. To personalize the profile, xiaonei has also developed functions to edit profile music and background.