Baidu Hi: The IM from Baidu

Written by Tangos on March 29, 2008
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Baidu HiThe IM penetration rate is in China is much higher than email (81% vs. 57%), and Tencent has built a cash machine around its popular IM client QQ. So it is totally not surprised that Baidu will roll out its own IM tool, and it has been rumored in the market for about a year. The rumor has been confirmed by Baidu when it start to recruit IM client software developers in last month. Now the IM from Baidu, which is called Baidu Hi, is out for public beta.

Baidu Hi has almost all the basic features which an IM in China should have, such as voice/video chat, file transfer, IM group and interface personalization. Baidu Hi is bundled with Baidu Space which has over 920k concurrent users already, which will definitely be helpful to Baidu Hi’s promotion. The integration of Baidu Space is just the first step, all other Baidu community products, such as Baidu Zhidao and Baidu Tieba, will also be integrated with Baidu Hi eventually. Baidu Hi is quite smart with viral marketing, only users who has invited at least 30 friends successfully are qualified to have right to create IM groups.

I do not expect big innovations from Baidu Hi, since it is not easy for an IM tool. However, I shared the same disappointment as Keso, the most famous and visionary IT blogger in China. He thought Baidu Hi should adopt open standard XMPP protocol instead of building its own proprietary protocol. By exploiting the power of an open source community, Baidu can build an open platform to compete with the QQ. But now, Baidu choose to challenge QQ by itself.

Do we need another IM tool, when we already have QQ, AliWangWang, MSN Live Messenger, GTalk, Skype and others? With extensive user base and strong community products, Baidu has a good base to promote its IM software and keep the activeness of users by integration with online SNS features. We do not expect Baidu Hi will challenge QQ’s market position in near future, but it is possible to share desktop position with QQ for many users.

Baidu Hi

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7 Responses to “Baidu Hi: The IM from Baidu”

  1. xujie on March 29th, 2008 11:36 am

    The IM penetration rate is China ->The IM penetration rate in China

  2. Charles Peng on March 29th, 2008 2:07 pm

    Baidu HI is just cool, and I like it, but it’s a shame that all of my friends are currently use QQ or MSN, it’s very hard to persuade them to use Baidu HI.

  3. kossi on April 2nd, 2008 3:17 am

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  4. Baidu Hi, The Compliment, Ambition, Disappointment and Expectation : THE MOBINODE - Tracking Dragon’s Web - Best China Tech Blog on April 2nd, 2008 7:44 am

    […] The Disappointment -  I agree with Keso and Tangos. Both pointed out the Baidu Hi should have adopted open standard XMPP protocol instead of developing its own proprietary protocol. I would love to use Adium to chat with my Baidu Hi friends on mac one day, so I think it is something nice to have. But, XMPP is a dedicated protocol designed for near real time, extensible instant messaging and presence information (a.k.a. buddy lists), and Baidu Hi might be more than a IM in future (a service hub, a service integrator…), I will give it an OK. Many other popular IMs, such MSN, Skype are not XMPP supported anyway. […]

  5. 关于Baidu Hi的四点想法 : 动点博客 MOBINODE on April 3rd, 2008 6:44 am

    […] 不足 － Keso和Tangos在他们的报道中都提到，Bai Hi应该采用开放标准的XMPP协议，而不是再自行另设一套协议。我赞同他们的观点。我非常希望有一天也能够通过苹果电脑上的Adium和Baidu Hi里我的好友们即时交流。不过，作为专用协议的XMPP，主要针对的是实时短讯和好友列表的传递和共享，而Baidu Hi未来却可能不仅仅只是一款即时通讯软件（也许会成为一个服务集成和整合的中心……），出于以上考虑的话，我也可以理解百度的选择。毕竟目前知名的许多即时通讯工具，例如MSN，Skype和QQ，也都没有支持XMPP协议。 […]

  6. Erwin van Lun on April 6th, 2008 9:29 pm

    Hi Tangos,

    Interesting article! I am currently building a website chatbots.org that has a purpose to collect all chatbots in the world. We have found enormous amounts of webbots and chatbots for Live Messenger. But we have never found any example of chatbots for QQ, AliWangWang or Baidu Hi ,probably because we don’t speak Chinese (that makes life difficult).

    Do you have examples of chatbots for those IM clients?

    Thanks in advance!

    Cheers
    Erwin Van Lun

  7. Some Stats On China’s IM Services : China Web2.0 Review on April 8th, 2008 10:59 pm

    […] Just two weeks after Baidu Hi launched its public beta test, Baidu announced on yesterday that over 1 million users has tried Baidu Hi. An IM service from Baidu will definitely attracts users’ attention, similar to Google’s GTalk. The real challenge is how many percentage of registered users will remain active six month later. […]

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