Baidu Space

» see hi.baidu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

baidu space belonged to a chinese-language social internet i was not on. it launched in july 2006 while i was mid-way through a semester at university in ankara. i was using msn for chat plus a couple of turkish forums for hardware talk. gmail was where my mail lived by then. the chinese search engine's move into personal profiles was a headline on the english tech blogs and nothing i could click into with any real user context.

baidu launched space on 13 july 2006 at the hi.baidu.com subdomain. the pitch was profile-plus-blog. a personal page hanging off a baidu account, with a blog, a photo album, a friend graph pulling from baidu's other properties. the tagline translated as "let the world find you" and sat on the front page for the whole life of the product. by 2008 the service reported around 40 million unique visitors and was ranked as the eleventh biggest social media property globally, almost all of that a chinese-domestic figure.

the mid-2000s chinese social web had a pile of these homegrown profile products. renren covered the university crowd under its old xiaonei name. qzone was the tencent-owned profile layer welded on top of qq messenger. baidu space slotted in as the search company's version of the same idea, a way to give every baidu account a stable personal profile url and a small blog to hang off it. for a few years it worked well enough.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

baidu posted the shutdown notice on 4 april 2015. users had one month to download their content or migrate it into baidu cloud, the successor storage product. on 7 may 2015 the space urls went dark. nine years of chinese-language personal pages were compressed into cloud drive archives and effectively disappeared from the open web. the migration was structured so most casual users lost the front-of-page presentation their profile had been giving them for a decade.

~ what got buried with it ~

the chinese social graph moved to wechat in the years around 2013 and 2014. baidu never had an equivalent product to hold onto. the shutdown of space was one of the quiet moments where the search company admitted it did not own a piece of the social layer that mattered. the personal urls survive as dead redirects. the content, for anyone who did not download it in april 2015, is inside baidu cloud accounts that in most cases have not been opened since.

~ the long tail ~

baidu still ran other social-adjacent products after 2015. tieba, the discussion forum platform, is still alive. baike, the wikipedia-clone, is still alive. the personal-profile category was the piece that got dropped. it turned out to be the piece baidu had never really owned, only leased from users who were already moving to qq and later wechat for the same job.

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