Said Paul Glazowski of Mashable two days ago: “Watch out Xiaonei, Xiaoyou, and anyone else taking cues from what is now perhaps the most popular network in the world. The real Facebook has come to town. China, that is. Yes, big town.”
Frankly I’m not so bullish about FB China; IMO Facebook is not going to conquer the Mainland market. How do I know this? Because almost all other western web-services before them failed to do so too, no matter how successfully they entered other overseas-markets before. Even MySpace currently only ranks on place 12, pretty much behind everybody else.

Without a full-scale local subsidiary (including server-infrastructure, FB’s Chinese language cersion links to zh-cn.facebook.com), any business is subject to China’s Net-Nanny, a problem that local competitors mostly do not have–and Facebook especially has to face very strong competitors (or copy-cats, for that matter); Beijing-based Facebook-clone Xiaonei with an investment of USD 430 million from Softbank even has a larger founding under their belt than the original.
While western products still have the kool-aid-factor in China, this is not entirely true for web-services, where intimate knowledge of local cultural norms, values and needs gives the competitive edge.

Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web contemplates that since “most of Facebook’s growth at this point is coming from outside of the United States, it only makes sense for Facebook to target the rapidly growing Chinese Internet market, which now boasts a larger online population than the US.” What he forgets to mention, though, is that the size of the Chinese internet-market only ranges in the ballpark of countries like the netherlands when comparing general web-expenditures and -earnings (as far as I remember figures from last year).

Let’s see if FB is heading to down the same road as everybody else. Now, please, I’d love to hear some comments to prove me wrong…

Two days ago IT security provider McAfee published the new version of its Most Dangerous TLDs Report, as announced on CNET before. According to McAfee, this years’ most malware ridden TLD is .hk–which caught some commenters and me by surprise after reading CNET’s announcement (as CNET linked to last year’s version of the malware report). Last year, HK was on position 28, in the ballpark of a few European TLDs (like Belgium)–even 20 places better than domains from the US. This means that during the past months the threat-level of .hk-domains jumped by a stunning 27 places, even surpassing Mainland China!

Says research analyst Shane Keats: “Even if the greatest percentage of dangerous sites use the .hk domain, that doesn’t mean they are all based in Hong Kong or that more malware distributors are located there… Many sites, particularly the malicious software sites, choose the most affordable domain registrars in countries with the least regulation, so usually they are not located in that country…”

Last time I checked on local HK-domains, they came at a hefty extra-charge (one of the reasons why Linking People’s web-address is a .com). I wonder if this duty was changed during last year? Anybody any ideas?