Xiaonei, the China’s Facebook clone is announcing the launched of its developer platform. According to CNet China, Xiaonei is the first China-based social network to launch its first-of-its-kind developer platform. However, don’t get Xiaonei wrong, this initiative is not its move in facing-off with Facebook, it’s just follow what Facebook’s market positioning in order to attract more users, and Chinese developers.

Like many others who came across Facebook, but never heard of Xiaonei, it’s exactly a Facebook clone. On the landing page, it looks pretty much exactly like the Facebook home page. The user interface, design, width and length of the layout, a small icon “your online friend(s) located in the bottom right looks the same as found on Facebook, but the only difference you can found is the language, i.e. Chinese Simplified. It is important to understand that Xiaonei is one of the top social networking sites in China, according to metric such as registered users amounted to 20 million. If you want to register as a user, you need to submit your personal details, that’s it. Unlike some other sites in China, you need to key in the China identity card number during the login authentication process. I’m not from China, I faced this difficult situation like this all the time. However, on Xiaonei, what you need to fill-up are the name, password, email address, as well as the country territory you’re coming from (currently you can only fill-up that you’re from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau). Upon you registered yourself into the Xiaonei system, you can find your friends through MSN, 163, 126, Sina, or Yahoo! Mail. Additionally, you also can search and filter your friends through your email clients such as Outlook or Foxmail. One little caveat from Xiaonei is please upload your photo as well as use your real name, if you do that, you’re entitled to be a so-called “Star” user, and hence enjoy unlimited storage space on Xiaonei.

Facebook platform has been key to Facebook’s positioning, but I wonder the forthcoming Xiaonei platform will also become the greatest asset to Xiaonei. Nevertheless, this might served as a mental shift to a China startup like Xiaonei as one open up its platform, it will thus open up its user base to the third-party developers. Traditionally, user base is being treated as a confidential and yet very important asset to a Chinese startup. However, it is interesting to see that MySpace China and 51.com have also both agreed to open up their platforms to the developers.

Currently, Xiaonei developer platform is open to some beta developers, and is not a production-ready platform. All the applications developed will be tested internally, before this platform is fully launch in mid of June. All applications are built using Xiaonei APIs that appeared on Xiaonei user profile page are not from the third-party developers, but served as the local own applications of Xiaonei. This include My Blog, Photo Album, Group, Share List, My Classes, My Club, Gift, Market, Movie, Sports, Sanguo (as shown in the below picture). Users are allowed to install or remove the applications if they want to. And all of these can be found on the left-hand sidebar. So, at least for now, there are few applications for Xiaonei users to play around with.

Picture 1: Application Page

Picture 2: Xiaonei Sangou