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.

Meebo Repeater is a simple software that helps you to chat safely in a circumstance when your workplace has blocked port access to IM services. I like the fact that you do not need to learn to use Web proxies in order to access to the IM network.

As Meebo said, proxies aren’t the safest thing on the Web, just install this Meebo Repeater on your PC desktop will get you instant message your buddies. Simple and no any tricks to learn in this case. However, you need to learn to hide this program from your superior or peers.

A much-anticipated Facebook chat service has been launched in this week. As most of the social networking platforms have not developed their own set of chatting tool, Faceboook is unveiling its own chat service, which eventually would not let any third-party instant messenger (IM) applications to lure their users into using their apps. From the Facebook’s blog, Josh Wiseman, engineering lead said there are many notable features can be found on this Facebook chat, no installation nor buddy list is required to run this chat service, but if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be one of the first batch of users to experience this. To check whether you’ve been selected as one of them to use this service, simply notice are there any chat icon appeared on the below of your Facebook profile.

Chatting with your Facebook friends is nothing new now. I came across few third-party apps such as FriendVox, social.im, or Babuki that allowed you to do so. All these apps have been successfully integrate to the Facebook platform, and there are not niche apps anymore. When looking at the Babuki’s features, it allowed an user to go beyond the simple instant message, by offering the SMS and mail service that are accessible inside the Facebook profile.

What I was told about this Facebook chat was that it can’t be removed. For users who log-in to their Facebook profiles once, less than 10 mins in a day, when they see the incoming chats, they’re expected to spend more time in chatting with their friends, which in turn help a Facebook user to stay a longer period of time on Facebook. However, an option of “go offline” is provided if she choose not to chat through the Facebook platform.

I heard Facebook chat might also add chat APIs and Jabber support in the future. I’ll go into it in my future post. Stay tuned.

Source: Facebook Watcher

Today Google is releasing its Google Talk, Labs Edition, a new version of Google Talk which enables news notification of GMail, Google Calendar and Orkut, in addition to the built-in features of Google Talk Gadget. It is Google’s initial foray into the desktop space whereby its users can now install Google Talk in their PCs or laptops. Though it will have little impact on the instant messenger (IM) market, this release underscore Google’s aim in extending its product not solely on the Web, but also as a client software version. From now on, there will be four different version of Google Talk: the original client, Gmail Chat, the gadget and the Labs edition.

To try it, You can download it when visiting this page.

via [Google Operating System]

Baidu, the China search giant has officially launched its instant messenger (IM) page. Its foray into the IM market has been a big win. They got a huge publicity on the China Web market, as I observed most of the major online news providers, blogs, most of them are reporting about their latest IM move. In the beginning of the month, I did posted a brief introduction on Baidu IM, now I knew that China users can download the IM software by visiting this page.

Baidu, now not only compete directly with QQ, the most popular IM software in China, it also clear that they’re attempting to offer a full range of Web products to the China users. What will be their next move, Baidu Mail, or Baidu English version of search engine?

Baidu, the China search giant has officially unveiled its instant messenger product, codenamed as Baidu Hi. Currently, it is in the private beta mode, hence not everyone get the chance to test this product. While I trying to access to the Baidu Hi page, the landing page is still not available. There are few information that I found after reading some other Chinese blogs’ about this Baidu Hi.

1) Baidu Hi is developed by using Visual C++, an IDE of Microsoft.

2) The user interface is a Flash made.

3) Baidu Hi may not support Windows 95, 98, or 2000, the Baidu Hi first release will only support Windows XP SP2.

Mozilla Foundation has launched a new subsidiary called Mozilla Messaging. Read the company name guess that this is a new venture that expected to develop a series of messaging related products. And you’re right, as mentioned by Mozilla’s CEO David Ascher, this is a new Mozilla subsidiary that focused on the area of email and Internet communications, with aiming to develop a new cutting-edge Thunderbird 3. The outlined features included integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird), better search facilities, easier configuration, and many more.

I like the fact that Mozilla is putting its effort on developing another good Web product beside Firefox. While the Thunderbird version 3 has not been materialized, the expectation was high because now this upcoming online communication client is being backed by a new startup, with a bunch of talents working day and night on it. But I don’t think this product will generate a lot of buzz as it is not a new tool for open source lovers. If you’re an open source lover, you should heard of an open source organizer mash-up that combine email, calendar, scheduling features, instant messaging (IM) and others into one that called Spicebird.

via [Linux Magazine]

Imo.im, a startup that I covered when it launched in September last year released its own Facebook application. With this application, Facebook users can thus communicate with their friends on Facebook platform without having to leave Facebook. IM (Instant messaging), has became a critical real-time communication tool, and this imo.im removes the barriers to IM and video chat to almost 60 million of Facebook users.

All the features of the imo.im are available with this application. You can link your AIM, GTalk, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger or any other standard IM services on your Facebook now, simply with a click of install on your Facebook account. All the while, imo.im served as an IM aggregator, aggregate all of an user’s standard IM services, but now with this Facebook application, we might just realized the true value of imo.im.