I just came across a website that have a domain as follow: myspace.cn. It seems that MySpace is set to launch in China soon. On the web page, it showed the following message, i.e. Still Under Construction (in Mandarin). But somehow I don’t understand why MySpace will create a specific domain for the China market, I first thought MySpace will use its usual practice, a subdomain in international markets i.e. cn.myspace.com. When I checked the whois record of this myspace.cn, I found the following details:

Domain Name: myspace.cn
ROID: 20040123s10001s00948621-cn
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant Organization: MySpace
Registrant Name: MySpace MySpace

Administrative Email:
Sponsoring Registrar: Intercosmos Media Group, Inc. d.b.a. DirectNIC.com
Name Server:ns1.myspace.com
Name Server:ns2.myspace.com
Registration Date: 2004-01-23 07:00
Expiration Date: 2008-01-23 07:00

This showed that MySpace’s China domain was registered since year 2004 through the above mentioned Intercosmos Media Group. To note, Intercosmos Media Group is one of the Top 10 internationally accredited domain name registrars, owning and operating DirectNIC.com.

In matter of fact, MySpace did created their webpage in Chinese and trying to recruit the first batch of China users recently. But they made a mistake in the code by translating the user agreement from Chinese to Japanese as showed in the picture below. However, MySpace quickly noticed this and withdrawn the site.

When a new site planned to enter the China market, I will usually notice that there are two groups of people that closely observing what’s going be the next step this company likely to take. One group of people are optimists, these optimists will tend to believe this new site will going to make in China. Another group are pessimists, they likely to believe a local site will again, outperform their competitor. As Google, eBay, Yahoo, all have struggling in achieve the market leadership in China market, I think MySpace has learned what and how important that they want to be a “second-mover” or “third-mover” in the China market. Additionally, not only that they having the difficulty in China market, I think MySpace will also struggling in becoming the No. 1 player in Europe market as well. Indeed, I regret to see that when people all around the world are talking about globalization, the nationalism has also increased over the year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not right the wrongs when there is a good marketing strategy for a company that planned for the overseas expansion. This is an issue on how a site that going to convince people in the foreign markets that it is indeed, a local site. My advice to the new site when they want to penetrate the foreign markets, please don’t aimed high, when you don’t aimed high, your expectation is low, you’ll sleep well even if you fail, you would not paralyzed by failure. In addition, you’ll be more humble, when you humble enough, more people will likely to accept you.