Renren
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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[1]. 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.
Contents
History
Renren - originally called Xiaonei.com - was created by a group of students at Tsinghua University and Tingjing University in May of 1999. One of the student creators, Joseph Chen, had created another company called Oak Pacific in October 2006 and had acquired Xiaonei through it.
In 2008, the mobile version of Xiaonei was launched, which featured an instant messaging section. Shortly after in August of 2009, Xiaonei changed its name to Renren, which in Chinese "people" or "person", promoting how the website is meant to be used by anyone. This helped with the expansion of the social network website.
Two years after changing its name, the company raised $584 million in capital in an IPO through the SEC index. Until late 2015, Renren had a market capitalisation of $2.86 billion[2]. Since then, the company value feel by 60% and now has a market capitalization of 571.58 Million[3].
Chinese Firewall
The Chinese Firewall started in August 1996 and is part of a massive censorship program initiated by the Chinese government. The Communist Party of China dictates that select websites be blocked from view, key words be filtered out, and that certain speech and online activities be filtered. The firewall not only filters out individual websites but also uses techniques to scan URLs and web page content for blacklisted keywords. Filtering out social networking websites such as Facebook forces people to use Chinese alternatives, ones that the government can control. In addition to acting as a barrier to information, the Chinese Firewall had said to act as a barrier to trade, with eight of the most trafficked websites in the US being blocked[4].
The Internet in China
User Base
Functions
Recent Growth Problems
Ethical Considerations
Privacy
Filtering
Renren Unique Features
References
[1] TECHNOLOGY SECTOR ACTIVE NEWS ALERT: GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE INC (NYSE:GWRE), RENREN INC (NYSE:RENN) [2]
