Xianguo: A new challenger to Zhuaxia.com

Written by Yanqing Chen on September 8, 2007
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ZhuaxiaZhuaxia.com has been the dominate online RSS reader in China for a while. However, they have to face strong competition from Xianguo.com, which keeps upgrading their features since they launched in May 2007. I will do a quick head to head comparison of the two, mainly covering following factors:

EASE OF USE AND PERFORMANCE
Category Winner: Xianguo (by a small margin)

XianguoEven though Xianguo wins this category, it does not have an obvious edge over Zhuaxia. Both tools are on the same level as Google Reader in term of ease of use, they are user-friendly and easily to user for newbies, and they both provide options for users to adjust them to suit their reading habbits. They are even on the performance side, both readers are slightly less responsive when loading lots of feeds, but neither is too annoying.

However, Xianguo is better than Zhuaxia in some areas. The Ajax support of Xianguo is slightly better. Xianguo supports keyboard shortcuts which is very nice for those who like using keyboard for navigation instead of mouse.

USEFUL FEATURES
Category Winner: Zhuaxia

There’s one big feature that Zhuaxia has, but Xianguo doesn’t have, and even Google Reader just added it recently, the ability of searching inside the subscriptions. This is a huge advantage for Zhuaxia, since the searching ability is a common user scenario.

Zhuaxia has a blog aggregation channel, which classified daily blog post into different categories, and show the most important articles. The channel allows you to use Zhuaxia as a public blog aggregator instead of personal rss reader.

While Xianguo has some desktop tools like XianguoRadar (a desktop reminder), Vista Widget, and a Yahoo Widget, which enables the integration of online rss reader and a desktop clients. Xianguo also offers widgets to show your shared items in your websites or blogs.

SOCIAL NETWORKING
Category Winner: Zhuaxia

It is no doubt the winner would be Zhuaxia. The social network features of Zhuaxia are much more mature than Xianguo’s. Actually Zhuaxia has put together big efforts on improving its social network features recently, you may read our previous report on its improved personal profile feature.

CONCLUSION
Overall Winner: Zhuaxia

Zhuaxia is more mature and has been there longer than Xianguo, and from the number of readers of our blog, we can know Zhuaxia is still the most popular China’s rss reader, but Xianguo did a really good job in challenging Zhuaxia in such a short time.

However, we can feel the difference between the strategy of Zhuaxia and Xianguo. As we mentioned above, Zhuaxia emphasize a lot of its blog aggregation channel and social networking features, it takes a media-centric development strategy, while Xianguo is more like a Google Reader, which aims to providing a good rss reader to users.

To developing a pure online rss reader is difficult, there are some China’s players having entered dead pool, including Boyue and Gougou. Will Xianguo insist on its current development strategy in the future, or will it become another Zhuaxia? We will keep eyes on its development.

3 Responses to “Xianguo: A new challenger to Zhuaxia.com”

  1. zcc on September 9th, 2007 1:37 am

    But the google is the best for most people.

  2. Yanqing Chen on September 13th, 2007 2:20 am

    Yes, Google is good. But in China there are still many people who are not comfortable using an all English rss reader

  3. Hainei Adds Xianguo Hot, A Step to Platform? : China Web2.0 Review on March 31st, 2008 2:20 am

    [...] Xianguo Hot, the new feature partnered with Xianguo, a popular online rss reader, is something like putting Xianguo’s homepage inside Hainei. You can read the hottest articles digged by Xianguo’s users without leaving Hainei. The rss reader feature of the new competitor Yiqi.com may accelerated this cooperation. [...]

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