Renren

Renren is a social networking website with 160 million registered users in China. Literally, Renren translates to "everyone's website" in Chinese and is known for being the people's network. Due to the Great Firewall, which controls the flow of information from the outside world including Facebook, social networking websites have arisen specifically for China. While the site remains popular, throughout 2015, Renren has faced significant decline due to strong competition and the inability to properly monetize its mobile platform. In 2011, Renren faced a privacy leakage, revealing the confidential information of thousands of users. Ethical considerations for Renren include content filtering, improving the detection of fake users and analyzing the effects of Renren specific functions and features.

History

Similar to how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm, Renren - originally called Xiaonei.com - was created by a group of students at Tsinghua University and Tingjing University in December of 2005.

In 2008, the mobile version of Xiaonei was launched. Shortly after in August of 2009, Xiaonei changed its name to Renren, which in Chinese "people" or "person", inspiring for the website to be used by anyone.

Two years after changing its name, the company raised $584 million in capital in an IPO through the SEC index. Renren had a market capitalisation of $2.86 billion until late 2015. However, the company dropped[1] -0.60% and now has a market capitalization of 571.58 Million.

Chinese Firewall

In China, the need for a social network stems from the majority of Western websites being blocked from the country due to the Chinese Firewall. It's origins

References

[1] TECHNOLOGY SECTOR ACTIVE NEWS ALERT: GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE INC (NYSE:GWRE), RENREN INC (NYSE:RENN)