
The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/the-chinese-internet-why-the-%e2%80%9ccopy-cats%e2%80%9d-win/
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coconutrandom
That was a really good article

    
    
      Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a 
      thing or two about original Web ideas from the
      Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a 
      lot about monetization from China.
    

and it goes to explain with an example with a Chinese version of match.com

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chrischen
I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff.

Good thing I'm Chinese. Hopefully I will have a cultural advantage if I decide
to operate there one day.

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bootload
_"... I think Chinese people will just relate better to homegrown stuff ..."_

There are possible explanations to this idea in an article I read yesterday ~
"Welcome to China's millennium", Martin Jacques ~
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china-
ma...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/23/china-martin-
jacques-economics)

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joblessjunkie
"men are universally attracted to women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio"?

I suspect that this ratio has been reported backwards.

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swernli
The number is correct, the wording is backwards. Studies have shown that
waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) for women considered attractive within their
cultures hover around average of 0.7. Interestingly enough, variation in
attractive frontal WHR across cultures dissapears when using circumference as
a measurement; in that case it collapsed down pretty reliably to 0.7.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist-hip_ratio>

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RevRal
I clicked your link, and I have to say that their idea of a really attractive
WHR is really spot on (the example at the top).

The last section is also very interesting. I'd like to see a study done on the
people who find smaller hips more attractive, whether this correlates to less
intelligence.

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jpwagner
_"...whether this correlates to less intelligence."_

I laughed out loud when I read that line. Maybe it is correlated with poor
eye-sight!

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yummyfajitas
It's probably correlated with working in fashion.

<http://boingboing.net/2009/10/06/the-criticism-that-r.html>

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bnomis
The main reasons local versions are more popular are a combination of:

\- it's in Chinese

\- it's not blocked by the GFW

\- it's faster (the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down)

\- it's still accessible when China Telecom has been tweaking the routers and
DNS servers (which they seem to do every week)

That is, practical reasons which lead to adoption and growth.

There are, of course, cultural specifics that have to be taken into account
but those are pretty obvious if you're building a site in China for the the
local market. And these local touches can only add to the site attractiveness
together with being inside of the GFW. So, it's kind of obvious that a local
site is going to do better than a foreign one.

Occassionally people will talk about designing the look of the site for the
local market but I'm not convinced it's an issue. Good taste is good taste
everywhere. For example, the iPod is just as popular here as everywhere else.
A well designed and functional site in China is always going to win over the
equivalent site that is outside of the GFW for the reasons above.

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est
> the GFW slows access to everything outside of it down

Just FYI: the GFW works in parallel, all backbone cross nation data are copied
to GFW equipments, and GFW actively injects RST packets into backbone
transmissions. I don't see how this slows the Internet down. It's just the
total bandwidth is too small. There has to be more cross-pacific fiber optics.

~~~
bnomis
Yes the GFW is regional - i.e. there's more than one filter across the
country. But the GFW actively monitors and blocks on _content_. This filtering
and inspection takes finite time and hence slows everything down.

There is plenty of bandwidth. Accessing the same sites from Hong Kong is
orders of magnitude faster. And BTW less prone to random errors introduced by
clueless monopoly operators.

~~~
est
> blocks on content

Perhaps you didn't understand how GFW works. The content is delivered to you
after the RST signal, it's just the standard TCP stack ignored it. You browser
may loading a page in half then suddenly Page-Not-Found, but if you have
sniffer like tcpdump you can see the rest of the packets were still sent to
you correctly.

Another phenomenon to help you understand the mechanism is that GFW fails from
time to time. Why? Because the RST packets arrives too late.

HK has its own Internet infrastructure, it has nothing to do with mainland
Internet. In fact lots of inner-China Internet connections are routed to HK
then to the rest of the world.

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bnomis
The fact that RST is sent mid stream in no way lessens the point that the
content monitoring leads to a narrowing of bandwidth which slows things down.

HK's Internet Infrastructure maybe its own but it is still this side of the
Pacific and it is a lot faster to access US sites from HK than it is from
China. And if, as you said, China traffic is routed through HK then the only
difference is the GFW which is slowing things down.

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est
So what's your point? I don't see how GFW slows the Internet down in any way.
Except RST packets bandwidth which is too tiny.

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bnomis
Just because you don't see how it slows things down does not mean that it does
not slow things down. The web in China is slower than the web in HK. Why? I
don't know precisely because I don't have access to the GFW of course. Think
of it as a funnel, the communication has to pass through the funnel so that
the RST (or whatever) can be inserted. There's only so much BW in to and out
of the funnel - so the traffic slows. The very fact the filtering happens must
insert some delay.

Have you tried the web in China?

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est
I am sorry but I don't see any reasonable facts or explanation of how GFW
slows the Internet down. HK is fast because your ISP is fast, it has nothing
to do with GFW. I can download from ThePirateBay with the speed of 37MB/s in
Chinese CERNET, and I can watch Youtube HD/HQ videos in ChinaTeleCom's 1Mb
ADSL smoothly in midnight when the Internet is not busy.

I am a native Chinese living in China. And the tool I am using to visit
youtube does not require any 3rd-party servers, it hacks into GFW and
establish connections to blocked sites directly. :)

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Dilpil
Wow, that matchmaking service sounds pretty intense. They literally ask women
out for you.

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w1ntermute
And it clearly works; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many women using the
site.

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dstorrs
The thing that impressed me the most was the discussion of the quantitative
work they have done. Song Li has generated an enormous database of pragmatic,
mathematically proven advice about how to be successful with the opposite
gender...somehow, using it for nothing more than a matchmaking service
restricted to China seems small potatoes. Granted, it was gathered from a
Chinese-only audience, so some of it is probably locale-specific. I'd be
interested to see the same thing done on a more global scale and then adapted
for other uses.

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roundsquare
Yeah. It'd be awesome if they published it the way okcupid was.

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amix
I think author misses that the Chinese market isn't free and most of the
western sites are blocked by the great Firewall. I think their market would
look at lot differently if their market was free and anyone could compete on
it.

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FooBarWidget
Match.com isn't blocked.

And if I'm a Chinese (I am) in China visiting a western website the first
thing I'd think is "OMG it's not in Chinese", after which I'd go look for a
native version. Some sites do localization, but it's rarely done correctly.
For example search results are still polluted with foreign information and
some pages are only available in English.

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Frazzydee
Not saying that your points aren't valid, but you should know that I've found
western sites generally load far slower than Chinese ones in China. I
completely gave up trying to use facebook without turning off images.

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ahlatimer
Am I the only one that's getting 403'd when I try to access this page?

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Sam_Odio
It looks like every article on techcrunch.com is down. Probably some apache
rewrite issue.

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est
I don't think the 'copycats' win, it's just the originals didn't do their
best.

ChinaHR sucks balls

<http://www.google.com/search?q=chinahr+%E7%83%82>

any first year college students can write better .asp pages than that, it's
just many hiring companies are using ChinaHR exclusively and you have to apply
on it.

Digu.com & Zhenai.com has a terrible reputation for spamming and selling
private user data.

The real secret for winning in Chinese market? Marketing and PR. Especially
good relationship with the right Communist party leader.

