The other day I talked about Xiaonei, a successful Facebook clone in China. It seemed that social network and the clone Facebook UI (User Interface) still a great deal in China, as the China IM (instant messenger) giant, QQ has launched its social networking service, a Facebook clone to its IM users few days ago.

This QQ social network is called QQ Xiaoyou, in Chinese mean “QQ校友,” i.e. QQ alumni. It is currently in private beta phase, and will be launched to the selected QQ IM users. In fact, QQ is claimed as the number one IM provider in China, combining a critical mass of its IM users: active users 220 million out of registered users 570 million, and the messages sending approx. 1 billion per day, QQ has built an unique stronghold in IM services in China. In China, every startups want to emulate the success of QQ or Baidu, but most of these startups are late starters in the race to build such a huge user base.

On QQ Xiaoyou’s landing page, you’ll notice it look exactly like Facebook, but QQ Xiaoyou use green color instead of blue to make it clear that they’re not another Facebook. Nevertheless, this move is its second attempt to break into the University or college students’ community, as QQ has launched its first social networking community called “QQ Campus” in July 2007, but eventually have neither profits nor much in the way of market share to show for it.

For private beta users to register their accounts at QQ Xiaoyou, they need to use their real names, not their IM usernames as usual. To verify their users, QQ Xiaoyou is taking 3 to 5 days for each registered users in order to inhibit the fake accounts fraud, as shown in the picture below.