Hainei

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

~ the last words ~

Wang Xing came back to China from graduate study in the United States in 2003 and began starting companies. The one that worked was Xiaonei, the campus network he launched in 2005 on the Facebook model. It grew faster than he could pay for servers, and in 2006 he sold it to Oak Pacific Interactive, for 2 million dollars by the account of Taiwan's Business Next. Oak Pacific later renamed it Renren and took it to the New York Stock Exchange.

Wang kept most of his team and built twice more in 2007. Fanfou, a Twitter-style microblog, opened on 12 May. Hainei followed on 16 November. It was the grown-up sequel to Xiaonei: a social network for people who had left campus and gone to work, under the tagline "a network of real people". The front page of January 2008 promised that real names and real photos would help you find old friends, and said that for the moment you could only register on a friend's invitation.

Hainei disappeared in July 2009. Fanfou was switched off on 7 July, two days after the riots in Urumqi, because posts from the scene had gone out unfiltered. Hainei had nothing to do with that. It ran on the same servers, and Chinese accounts of Wang's career say the two sites closed one after the other that month. The Wayback Machine's last copy of the Hainei login page is dated 2 July 2009.

~ the record ~

~ parking spaces ~

The early notices were good. Business Next wrote on 1 January 2008 that Hainei, less than two months old, had already pulled in well-known bloggers and internet industry figures, and named Xie Wen and Luo Chuan among them. Its feature list was sober: a personal space with photos and a journal, plus a mini-blog you could post to from a phone by text message. The same article noted that Hainei, by its own description, did not do dating.

Kaixin001 opened in Beijing in March 2008 aimed at exactly the same office workers, and it led with games. Friends for Sale let you buy your colleagues. Parking Wars had you stealing spots on their virtual lots during work hours. Kaixin001 went on to claim more than 80 million registered accounts. The Baidu Baike biography of Wang says he tried to answer with games of his own for Hainei and that the execution fell short.

~ shared servers ~

By the summer of 2009 registration was open to anyone with an email address or a mobile number. The footer carried a Beijing police filing number beside the usual license, and neither document counted for anything in July, when the order was aimed at the machines next door.

~ the address sells payments now ~

Fanfou was allowed back in November 2010, by which time Sina Weibo had its audience. Hainei was not relaunched. Wang had opened Meituan, a group-buying site on the Groupon model, on 4 March 2010, and it became the delivery company he is known for. The domain hainei.com passed to other hands and today serves Hainei Kuaifu, a payment service that sells QR code checkout to shopkeepers.

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