Xiaonei Launches Platform and Fund … Sound Familiar?

For Xiaonei, the Chinese Facebook copycat, following in Facebook’s footsteps appears to be a strategic decision. Xiaonei has over 22 million users in comparison to Facebook’s more than 80 million active users. All 22 million are in China though where Facebook currently has less than 300,000 users according to statistics provided by Facebook’s SocialAds system.

Yesterday, Xiaonei announced the launch of their “Open Platform” initiative which mimics Facebook’s platform and an application fund, just as Facebook announced last year. Facebook’s fund hasn’t been the most successful though based on the lack of announcements coming out of Facebook about the fund. Other funds have also found it challenging to generate substantial returns on any of the platform applications.

So how much money is Xiaonei and their partner venture fund providing developers with? No exact numbers have been mentioned aside from “several million RMB” (1 USD = 8 RMB). It will be interesting to see how the battle between Facebook and Xiaonei pans out in China. Facebook recently launched their Chinese version but rumors have surfaced that the site appears to be inaccessible to a large number of users in the country potentially limiting Facebook’s growth.

Whatever happens to Facebook in China, it is clear that Xiaonei will be one of their primary competitors.