Jiwai.de and Fanfou: Twins of Twitter in China

Written by Tangos on May 31, 2007
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Jiwai.deEach successful company in silicon valley will have a dozen copycats in China, Twitter is no exception. Popwu is the first Twitter-like service in China, if we don’t count in the tumblelog feature of Weazone and V2ex. Now come Jiwai.de and Fanfou.

At first glance, we can know both Jiwai.de and Fanfou are clones of Twitter, they have almost the same UI design as that of Twitter, both of them translate Twitter’s famous “What are you doing” into Chinese as well. They support using MSN and mobile SMS to update and receive message, Jiwai.de does better by supporting QQ as well, since QQ is the most popular IM tool here. Open API and blog widget are provided too, and Fanfou’s blog widget has an image version beside java script version, because many blogging service in China may not allow users to add java script in blog sidebar.

FanfouBoth Jiwai.de and Fanfou have almost all features of Twitter, even have better features for Chinese users. Will they become successful in local market as Twitter is globally? It is not easy, because the key success factor of Twitter is not its features but how it attract enough users to generate network effects, but most of early adopters may have been users of Twitter. Anyway, bridging language gap will provide opportunities for them, which one can successfully inspire viral marketing would be critical. According to public timeline data of Jiwai.de and Fanfou, as of the time I’m writing this post (mid night), 7 messages were updated within 30 minutes in Jiwai.de and 9 messages in Fanfou during the same period.

AtnoteBesides Jiwai.de and Fanfou, Atnote also changed its focus to Twitter-like service recently, which they called MicroAtnote. MicroAtnote is just just one of many features of Atnote previously. This change would make its service better understood by users. Before the adjustment, Atnote has many features, but none of them is outstanding and can attract users to use. However, it is still not easy for Atnote to compete with Jiwai.de, Fanfou and other Twitter clones in China, in last 30 minutes, no one was updating message in Atnote, based on data in its homepage.

8 Responses to “Jiwai.de and Fanfou: Twins of Twitter in China”

  1. Yee on May 31st, 2007 1:45 pm

    Ping back
    Collection of Chinese version of Twitters
    http://ya.iyee.cn/2007/05/collection-of-chinese-version-of.html

  2. Linking Corner » Twitter-clones on June 2nd, 2007 2:48 pm

    [...] Twitter sees a lot of copycats right at the moment, while the original spawned quite some hot debates on the road to more growth (remember the discussion about the scalability of Ruby?). Anyway, China Web 2.0 Review (one of my favorites) recently points to two new Twitter-twins in Mainland: Fanfou.com and Jiwai.de. I was puzzled to see that german top-level-domain–can somebody explain to me why they got a .de-address, anybody? To own a .de-domain as a non-german resident, you have to have at least an admin-c with a local german address. In Jiwai’s case (domain owner registered in Beijing), a german law-office–something quite obvious. German IT-law forces you to display a complete company-address and -registration all over your site; not that Jiwai would care about that… [...]

  3. troy on June 9th, 2007 1:33 am

    说道Twitter深有同感，我是个人的Twitter爱好者，于是俺也打造了完全是满足个人欲望的网站作品印迹巴士：www.ingbus.com，其中印迹的功能就是Twitter的复制，不过我不像他们那么商业化，一切为了好玩。

    当然了，也支持MSN发布印迹，还能及时返回发布的结果。

  4. LaiGuLa: A Twitter-Like Service Launched in China at Tag Edge - Tech News, Venture Capital and Web 2.0 on June 13th, 2007 11:05 pm

    [...] I just came across a Twitter-like service in China. Alas, another Twitter clone in China. LaiGuLa is another player that just launched in China, still in beta mode but when you visit this site, you’ll notice that LaiGuLa is designed with the Twitter effects and reflections. On the landing page, an user can search her friends through the search bar, and each message is entitled to 140 characters. As stated above, LaiGuLa is not the merely Twitter-like player in China. Within a matter of months since Twitter launched, there are several Twitter-like players such as atnote, fanfou, jiwai.de, and popwu.com on the web (the names listed are according to alphabetical order). You also can read some of the brief introduction of these Twitter clones by clicking here. [...]

  5. Will Fanfou Gain Momentum as Twitter? : China Web2.0 Review on June 26th, 2007 11:04 pm

    [...] About one month ago, when I wrote a post on Chinese Twitter clones, I thought it is more important for them to inspire viral marketing than to develop rich features. One month later, when I review the development of these websites, I found Fanfou.com has started to build an ecosystem around its service, and become more and more popular. [...]

  6. Chinese Twitter Zuosa Supports QQ : China Web2.0 Review on July 13th, 2007 2:39 pm

    [...] Chinese Twitter market is in its infancy, but has already been crowded. Does the market deserve the effort? Alex Mou’s words show more confidence than mine. Our team has been specialized in building IM-based social network since 2005. Zuosa is just a new form of IM community where we can leverage our existing technology and experience. We will become a strong player in this IM-based social network market in China. [...]

  7. komoo on July 13th, 2007 10:11 pm

    http://komoo.cn 中文twitter 支持手机 msn等发布方式 欢迎访问

  8. Jiwai.de: The Chinese Twitter with Multimedia Supports : China Web2.0 Review on March 24th, 2008 10:39 pm

    [...] Jiwai.de is a Twitter copycat in China, which launched in May 2007 and now one of the top three Twitter-like service in China, after Tencent’s Taotao.com and Fanfou.com. Zhuohuan Li quoted a news about Seesmic’s $6M funding in Feb 2008, and said that Jiwai.de has video conversation supports in last December. [...]

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