Kaixin001

» see kaixin001.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

kaixin001 ran in mandarin for a chinese white-collar 20-something demographic in beijing and shanghai. i never had occasion to be on the chinese-language internet at any meaningful level. the great firewall meant the chinese web evolved as a parallel ecosystem with its own dominant platforms (qq for messaging, renren for student social, kaixin001 for the office crowd, then wechat for everything from 2011 onward). from ankara on ttnet broadband in '09, none of this was visible without going looking for it.

from wikipedia and from the english-language tech press that occasionally covered chinese internet stories. kaixin001 launched march 2008 from beijing, founded by cheng binghao who had been at sina. the product cloned the facebook formula then dominant in the english-speaking web (profile pages, friend feeds, applications, photo sharing) and adapted it for the chinese urban office worker who wanted to play casual social games during the workday without using qq.

the games were the engine. friends for sale was the breakout, where you bought and sold your friends as virtual property on the feed. parking wars came next, where you occupied parking spots overnight on a friend's virtual lot. these were facebook-app-tier games but on a network designed around them rather than tacked on. for the 2008-2010 chinese white-collar 25-year-old, kaixin001 was the office distraction. peak claims ran above 80 million registered users, in a country whose internet population was already several hundred million by then.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

there was a complicated trademark fight in the early years between kaixin001.com and a competitor named kaixin.com run by oak pacific interactive (the renren parent). oak pacific bought the kaixin.com domain in 2008 and ran a copycat site under similar branding to confuse new users. kaixin001 sued for trademark infringement and won in october 2011, with the beijing court ordering kaixin.com to stop using the name and pay 400000 rmb in damages. by then the trademark win was a minor footnote. the real story was that wechat had launched in january '11 and the chinese social graph was about to shift entirely to mobile.

tencent took an investment stake in kaixin001 in 2011 and tried to use the platform as a distribution channel for mobile games. titles like clash of three kingdoms were promoted on the kaixin001 feed alongside the older browser games. the pivot mostly did not work. the audience that had been on kaixin001 in 2009 for parking wars was on wechat by 2013 for a different kind of social activity, with smaller groups and more chat.

~ what carried over ~

by 2015 the site was inactive enough that wikipedia editors flagged it as out of date and noted the chinese-website ranking had fallen to 743. the kaixin001.com domain stayed up but the social-games engine that had defined it was no longer being updated, and the user base was no longer logging in. the wikipedia infobox lists the status as inactive without a clean shutdown date, which matches the pattern of chinese platforms that fade through neglect rather than through a press-released kill.

the kaixin001 episode is one piece of the larger story of how wechat absorbed the chinese social graph between 2011 and 2014. renren and kaixin001 had built the chinese facebook layer in '07-'10. sina weibo had built the chinese twitter layer in '09-'12. then tencent's wechat collapsed both layers into one mobile app with messaging and feed and payments and identity in the same place, and the dedicated social networks of the previous era stopped being where the attention was. kaixin001 was one of the more interesting ones because it was built around games rather than around connection, which is a model nobody really tried again at that scale.

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