CityIn Adds Content Aggregation As Hainei

Written by Tangos on April 12, 2008
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CityIn.com, a new SNS with some innovative features, continues adding new features since it launched about one month ago, such as face-detecting tech for photo tag. It now rolled out a new content aggregation feature, similar to what Hainei.com did.

Unlike Hainei’s partnership with Xianguo.com, CityIn offers this feature by itself. CityIn aggregates the latest posts from selective Chinese blogs or news on the web, and display in Digg format. Users then can vote or comment on any article, which will create a message on their friends’ newsfeed. Besides the default categorized feeds, you can also add your own favorites feeds to make it an online rss reader.

Recommendation engine is a key technology in CityIn, so of course, they add a recommendation module “People who read this article also read” for each article. Maybe because CityIn doesn’t have a big enough user base, the quality of recommendation is not good so far.

It is very interesting that Hainei, Yiqi.com and CityIn all rolled out content aggregation feature recently. What’s the rationale behind it? I guess they all think users tend to spend a lot of time in reading information, by offering content aggregation, their users will be more sticky and spend more time in the SNS.

However, SNS is more about the interaction and social activities among users. Reading content may help to let users stay longer in your site, but it offers limited value to enhance the social networking among users. Reading aggregated information is not what users expect to do in a SNS, though it may help them to find friends with similar interests in reading, but it would be better to put resources into developing features that can really satisfy users’ demand on networking.

CityIn.com rss reader

One Response to “CityIn Adds Content Aggregation As Hainei”

  1. Simon Chan on April 12th, 2008 10:40 pm

    Thanks for the review. I can’t agree enough with your statement “SNS is more about the interaction and social activities among users”. CityIN, and I’m sure the same to other SNSs in China, are working hard towards this goal.

    By the way, in CityIN reader, users can share what they like to read, or their comments to news, instantly through friend feeds. People no longer read alone.

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