Sina (in Mandarin) is reporting that Facebook has offered $10 million to acquire Tianwang, a Beijing-based search engine used mainly by the Chinese undergraduate students. The urgent need to expand to the China market meant that acquire some good Internet startups which users are the college students would be Facebook’s primary strategy. From the article, Tianwang said that discussions and negotiations are undertaken, but the main difference is the Internet valuations. Tianwang has approx. 3 million users, valuing per user $5, Tianwang should be valued at $15 million.

Meanwhile, Facebook has registered Facebook.cn domain and planned to launch its unique Chinese site, a new site that Facebook focuses on China student’s social networking activities. But don’t know the China landscape might be too crowded and too competitive, rumors suggested that Facebook has interested in acquire their biggest rival, i.e. a Chinese social networking site that called Zhanzuo. From the rumors, Facebook offered $100 million to buy Zhanzuo, however being rejected by the management of Zhanzuo.

Perhaps, the Internet mania in China is as extreme now, but I loved to see Facebook stop acquire other players and started to carve out its own niche in China.

Facebook today announced it was opening up the Facebook Application Directory as well as the applications’ “about” pages. Now who’re not the existing Facebook users can view these applications organized by recently popular, most activity, most active users and newest. Not only to this extent, those who are not Facebook user can access to the discussion board, and view the comments made on the applications. In particular, the first name and profile picture of the users that made the comments and the first name of the developers that developed the applications will be shown accordingly.

Is this an act of further invasion of user privacy following the announced of Facebook’s user profiles are available to everyone in last month. No doubt, information and user interaction is important to many, but my sense is that it just too few people that are willingly want to involve in this Facebook’s new experiment if they’ve the choice. I wonder those users who concerned of the privacy issues of this new setting will turn their profiles from public into private. Nevertheless, I believed Facebook has built security into their user setting before opening up the user profiles or application directory to avoid a negative business impact or putting their user data at risk. They definitely know if they can’t satisfy their users, their users will flee faster than they acquire a new user on the Web.

Wetpaint, a startup founded in June 2006 has launched its Facebook application called Wiki Whiteboard. Wetpaint was best known as a creator for the consumer-friendly wiki and the expand into Facebook territories allows the startup to forge new users and promote their collaborative platform. The launched of Wiki Whiteboard allowed an existing Facebook user to instantly create a collaborative wiki with her friends within the Facebook platform. Since Wetpaint platform is acted similarly to wiki or forum, but their main purpose is to make the site grow outside of their core by facilitating their users to contribute to some websites built by the Wetpaint community and to cultivate a knowledge society. Typically, Facebook users can start from scratch to create their wikis on any topics, or automatically connected to wikis for any Facebook groups that they have joined. It works much the same and in a predictable way as the Wetpaint users that using Wetpaint all the while, thus posting comments, links, stories, or photos are allowed in this Wiki Whiteboard.

Meanwhile, to encourage more Facebook users to join Wiki Whiteboard, Wetpaint has announced the “Makin’ Wiki Contents” to award a free 8G iPhone to one lucky person that creates a Facebook wiki using the Wiki Whiteboard. Currently, Wiki Whiteboard features several starter templates for the Facebook users, including Class Notes, Party Planner, Spring Break Planner, Video Gallery, Sorority/Fraternity and Dorm Hall.

Finetune, a digital music service with 1.2 million listeners has released the Facebook application today. Since its inception in this year, Finetune’s strategy had centered on music discovery and playlist creation. The released of such a custom-built application for Facebook platform has been foreseen as one of their objectives to push Finetune up to another level for further growth. There are variety of features that can be found on this app, i.e. My Soundtracks, The Daily Special and Social Soundtracks allowed Facebook users to enjoy their favorite playlists while building a social one for group purpose or the daily special one for one’s own music preference. The whole point is to create the playlists with the friends on Facebook page since online music listening is usually done alone at home, or at leisure place, the jointly effort in creating a playlist may strong appeal to some Facebook users.

Frankly, after observing numerous app that designed for Facebook platform and the success of iLike, the growth of this Finetune over the next few years may be slow but promising. Also, combined with the prospect of increased competition of all these similar music service players in the market, Finetune really need to good in segment their target market, not just good in bits and bytes in order to attract more users.

iLike has announced that they’ve attracted more than 10 million users. Thanks to the availability of Facebook platform, now iLike has became a megabrand. I wonder they will be the hottest target that soon to be snapped up for the megamoney? For a startup that was founded in October last year, less than a year, it was a great achievement. That’s explains why there are several sites offered tutorials on how to build a Facebook application recently, such as this one.

For the Facebook users, they just have their own choices to bypass the online auction and sales sites in order to sell goods directly from their profile pages due to the launched of Garage Sale platform by Buy.com. Garage Sale is a new online shopping site that allowed friends in a same Facebook’s contact group to trade their goods for the money. For this service, Buy.com will charge a flat 5% commission on any completed sales. This contrast to eBay where they charge sellers a listing and final transaction fee. However, all Facebook users must use credit cards to pay for the items, and the sellers can only get their money via eBay’s PayPal accounts or through checks from Buy.com.

“As the first company to market with this embedded e-commerce capability, we see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.” According to a Buy.com’s press release. This is fairly easy for Garage Sale to convince people that they’re offering a better facility to trade by combining the power of Facebook platform, with the aim also to compete with the likes such as eBay.

Still, this Garage Sale is based on the technology, i.e. RightCart from Shoperion that Buy.com acquired earlier this year.

Photobucket has released the newer version of Facebook application, now that Facebook members can have the options to access subalbums, quick pictures and send postcards, etc. There is more information can be found on their official blog entry.

An interesting study released by comScore showed that MySpace and Facebook are both not popular in Asian countries, albeit that their growing popularity in the U.S. and Europe. As shown in the below picture, only 8.1% of MySpace’s visitors and 7.1% of Facebook’s visitors are came from Asia-Pacific. Ironically, Friendster, not popular anymore in the U.S. has nearly dominated the whole Asia-Pacific, with 24 million unique visitors in June and 88.7% are from Asian countries.

It was the aggressive moves by Friendster in Southeast Asia that cause its continued popularity. Friendster is doing fantastic well in Malaysia at this moment, where the site has grown through the tie-up with some local pop singers there. Clearly, Asian countries has destined to be the next battleground in the social networking war between these three players I mentioned.

Apparently, when Asians can’t find their friends in MySpace or Facebook, despite the fact MySpace and Facebook have a stronger brand, it’s sound no difference. In this case, it was a cultural shock for MySpace and Facebook, and to me, social networking are closely linked to cultural prejudice. For example, you probably can find a group with same language, same ethnic in social networking site. Maybe it’s time for MySpace and Facebook to rethink their market strategy and build the local site to cater to the Asian market.

Source: adapted from http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1555, accessed 31 July 2007.