Will Fanfou Gain Momentum as Twitter?

Written by Tangos on June 26, 2007
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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.

Many people think API is missing in China’s websophere (1, 2), but it is changing gradually. An open API of a popular web 2.0 service will be very helpful to build interesting applications and develop competitive advantage. Passionated users of Fanfou have built quite a few mashups around Fanfou’s API. The following are some examples:

Fanfou3D

Besides various mashups, some web 2.0 services also began to integrate Fanfou into services. For instance, Zhuaxia, the online rss reader, adds a “Share to Fanfou” feature in its reader.

Alexa data also showed that the traffic of Fanfou increased significantly in last month, while the traffic of its competitors in China were rather flat. Considering Fanfou’s various mashups developed by its passionated users, I believe that Fanfou has gradually gained growth momentum and shows its great potential to be a successful Chinese Twitter. If it comes true, it would be another successful clone from its founder, Wang Xing, who is the founder of Xiaonei.com.

Fanfou Alexa

3 Responses to “Will Fanfou Gain Momentum as Twitter?”

  1. ubikr on June 27th, 2007 2:05 am

    hi, just to double check, are you saying that wang xing is the founder of fanfou.com? i could not confirm this infomration on internet. thanks!

  2. aman on June 28th, 2007 1:36 am

    you can find Wang Xing in fanfou.com and he is very active. also you can whois the domain name

  3. Ogilvy China Digital Watch » Growing Pains: How a Web 2.0 App comes of age on July 2nd, 2007 7:12 pm

    [...] A typical Web 2.0 application matures at the age of six–that’s Version 1.0–and has the potential to go far beyond seven. I’m not talking about actual years here, but about the steps toward maturity each application has to go through. Most applications will very likely never make it past the age of four, and in the case of China’s Web 2.0 scene, most applications are still hanging in limbo between the ages of two and three, although we’ve been getting positive messages on the proliferation of APIs the last two weeks. [...]

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