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China Web2.0 Review

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Taobao Improves Product Search InterfaceJanuary 7

Taobao has just updated its product search capability. You will see it on the homepage.

In September, Taobao banned Baidu’s search spider to access its content. Apparently it believes an in-site search will be more beneficial to its users.

The new search box looks very like a search engine. It has tabs which let you focus your search in different sub-domain of Taobao.

Not sure why we missed this. Taobao launched a Q&A platform in October, called Dating. Please read it in Chinese: Da Ting.

Taobao Dating has similar features like Baidu Zhidao. You can ask any question there, not just limited to product related ones.

Youdao Launches Product SearchJanuary 7

Netease’s search engine, Youdao, launched product search today. It’s called Youdao Gouwu. It has been under testing for a couple of weeks on a temporary domain.

The features are straightforward. You search for some product. It shows you available products from online shops. Not sure how the results are ranked. You can compare price. When you click an entry, it links you to the online shops’ website.

You will be able to comment on the shops. Your comments are stored on Youdao’s server. They will be shown along with the result.

This is the first product search released by a main search engine, ahead of Guge (Google China) and Baidu. While Baidu is preparing for its own online shop, it’s not going to release an objective product search engine in the near future.

Apply For Web Access of QQDecember 31 2008

On the first day of the new year, Tencent relaunched its web-based QQ service. Now it’s called My QQ.

It’s linked from it’s official QQ website. From its appearance it’s not just a web version of the product, but a user login of the whole site. Maybe a web-based social network is coming.

Tencent started testing its web based QQ in 2006, originally at this address: webqq.qq.com. But it has been shut down for a while.

The service is not fully open yet. You will need to apply for the access.

A web-based QQ is absolutely needed, especially in some companies which block QQ port. There’re some services hacking the protocol to provide web-based QQ access. Now the day of these business is over.

Source: chinaz

139.com: China Mobile’s Social NetworkDecember 30 2008

139.com Maybe this is old news, but it’s new to me, or at least the domain is new. China Mobile launched a social network at 139.com. The service is said to be live since September, originally on a domain hard to remember.

You don’t need to register to the service as long as you have a mobile phone number (China Mobile number certainly). But currently most of you cannot activate your account unless you are in Guangdong province.

Although we haven’t seen inside the service, but a couple of things make me believe it’s unique.

This service is true identity based in nature. You don’t need to fill in your personal information. Right after you activated your account, your details are already in the system including your personal identity number.

The service lets you check your SMS on the web. You will believe it’s useful if you forget your cellphone in your home one day. It also has a digg like feature to track the most forwarded short messages. Those joking stuff. Look forward to have a look.

Email address book and cellphone contacts are two important social data. While most of the SNS are using email address book, there’s no real use of cellphone contacts. Since this is China mobile’s service, you will feel safe to upload it. Or maybe they already know it.

There’s no need to compare websi

Ju690 Shows You What Chinese Users Are SharingDecember 29 2008

ju690 Ju690 is a social memetracker, which we firstly reported in July 2007, when it was still called onejoo. Since then the service has been improved a lot. The newest addition is a social recommendation aggregator.

Different from earlier ones like Zhuaxia hot article and Douban 9taps, which is centralized that you will have to vote for the article on these sites. Ju690’s social recommendation considers link sharing in other places like Google Reader and Twitter.

While the original motivation of Ju690 is anti-link sharing, since target users don’t share link a lot, the adoption of link sharing tools like Google Reader and Twitter has driven it back to the track.

The layout of the main page is simple. It’s a digg like layout, with three tabs: latest, hottest and upcoming. You will see where these votes come from under the article. In case the original site is unavailable there’s a cached version of the article.

Ju690 is currently a project for research purpose.

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