Xiaonei the Facebook clone has been acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive. The price was never disclosed by it’s nowhere near the Youtube/Google deal and it’s nowhere near the rumored deal between Yahoo and Facebook. I am pretty sure that the deal wasn’t even near the deal between News Corp and Myspace. I’d be surprised if it was. The article also goes into copying issues with the site’s form and function.

I used to find cloned websites or copycats to be cheap also. But let’s face it, it’s not China that’s doing this. Go read through Read/Write Web’s Top Web apps serie from around the world and you’ll find the majority of the sites are clones, but some just made it so it’s not identical in form. This has been discussed by many already and most of everyone’s response is a negative one.

It’s understandable but let’s face it, China will be the largest Internet market in 2007 and no one is/was building for China or if they did, they couldn’t get it right. The percentage of the internet users who can read and understand English is small. So what’s a country to do? Just ignore what’s going on around them and let the days go on by? This is part of the process of becoming innovative and keep in mind, China is still in the early stage of development and given time, a long long long time, things will change.

Possible related posts:

• CityIN – Intelligent social network
• Event: Chinese Internet Research Conference
• CityIN joins OpenSocial
• Web 2.0 in Asia
• Announcing Open Web Asia 2008 Conference