China’s MSN Space/Live Spaces head to head with BaiduSpace 百度空间
Time for me to do my homework on this. I’ve been personally less interested in Microsoft online products and services for the past several years, preferring to explore other options. But for understanding Virtual China, understanding MS is a must (as it would be for understanding virtual anywhere).
Did you know that globally, MSN Space had an estimated 100 million (100,000,000) unique visitors per month as of May this year? MSN Space launched in China in June 2005.
A Google search for MSN Space + China yields lots of information on MSN Space censorship and cooperation with Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of bloggers (for example, see 12/2004 BoingBoing post here and 6/2005 GlobalVoicesOnline post here). Not much else on the spaces themselves and what people are doing there.
Top Baidu searches in Chinese are all “How-Tos” such as this MSN Space Forum where you can post questions and learn how to create, manage, and promote your page, this free background generator, or this excellent blog on the latest MSN toys.
This June 28 ChinaByte article on Donews describes the upcoming competition between MSN Space and BaiduSpace. The article notes that Baidu’s July 15 launch of BaiduSpace is timed to coincide with MSN Space transition to the new Windows Live Spaces, which promises users new functionality and social networking tools, plus look and feel. It goes on to say:
In Baidu’s press release for BaiduSpace it says: Users are often disappointed by MSN Space’s speed and stability. There are often problems like not being able to open the homepage or not being able to post articles. On some websites where the Live Spaces news was released, user comments showed that they didn’t care much about how advanced the new functionality would be, rather their main concerns were about whether speed and stability would be improved. A user who participated in BaiduSpace’s beta revealed that, compared with other blogging tools he’d used, the most striking thing about BaiduSpace was how fast it was and how little time was needed to upload and download photos.
All Microsoft stuff here is incredibly slow. I don’t know whether to chalk that up to a lack of infrastructure investment by Microsoft due to their hesitation to fully commit to China because of piracy worries, or whether they just build their websites badly.