(Updated at 10:45 p.m. PDT with ping information from CNET China, and at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday with further information.)
Rumors began to surface late on Tuesday that Facebook could no longer get past the Great Firewall of China.
The company has acknowledged the situation but could not confirm a reason why. "We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in China are having difficulty getting access to Facebook," representatives from the social network said in a statement. "We have not made any changes to our site that would create access problems and are looking into the situation."
As early as Tuesday morning, a Wall Street Journal report suggested that Facebook members in China were having issues accessing the site, but the story gained little traction and suggested that technical difficulties may have been to blame.
China-based users of Twitter, many of them expatriates from the U.S. and Europe, painted a more suspicious picture. "Facebook is blocked in China," one said later on Tuesday. "There are going to be a lot of very p***ed off people here. What next, Twitter?"
"I'm on China Netcom and have the same issues with Facebook IP numbers, so it's not just China Telecom," another Twitter user said in response to theories that Facebook downages were related to Internet service providers.
However, Rick Martin, my colleague at CNET China, reports that access to the social-networking site is "off and on," but it "doesn't look like a block." Martin pinged the site and got a "unusual result"--30 percent packet loss. "Which kinda reflects the behavior I'm seeing--sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," he said.
The story flew under the radar for much of the day; the first I saw of it was a blog post from CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen. "They could have remained on if they had played by China's rules and allowed the government to censor their content," Van Veen wrote. "But unlike Google and Yahoo and everybody else, Mark Zuckerberg refused to play by their rules and told them to go f*** themselves. Hats off to you, Mark."
CNET News.com could not immediately confirm that assertion on the part of Facebook.
U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama appears in cartoon form on the logo of Chinese search engine Baidu.
(Credit: Baidu)Chinese-language search engine Baidu has an unusual new mascot atop its home page: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
A cartoon version of Obama is depicted next to a donkey, the Democratic party emblem. He's holding a net as though casting it, and attached to the end of the net is a computer mouse--get it? It's the Internet.
This is part of a "person of the month" feature that Baidu has instituted since November, the blog Shanghaiist explains. Each month, Baidu selects a real-life or fictional personality who has ranked high in its search queries. As Shanghaiist explains, it's "a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis." Barack Obama is the sixth installment in the series.
The series is hosted on the domain renwu.baidu.com; "renwu" means "historically important person."
While the biography of Obama on Baidu is largely celebratory, this is not a formal endorsement of the candidate. It is, however, an endorsement of his Web-savviness. Clicking on the Obama-adorned logo on Baidu redirects to a Chinese-language biography of the candidate and links to various media; the central talking point is Obama's status as a young politician who has successfully leveraged digital media and the Web to rise to fame. Of particular note, according to his Baidu page, is his speech about race in Philadelphia that soared to the YouTube stratosphere after appearing on television earlier.
But of more local relevance, the Baidu site about Obama also highlights the high volume of Chinese search queries for both Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Charts and graphs detail politics-related searches both Chinese and international. There are also information resources pertaining to what the U.S. presidential election means to China, and what Chinese citizens think about it.
"State and world affairs have become the most popular topics of concern for Internet users," a translation of part of Baidu's page about Obama reads. It doesn't seem to mesh particularly well with the Chinese government's rigid stance on the spread of information, particularly political rhetoric, on the Web.
Nor was it clear whether the Obama campaign would react positively, considering the tense relationship between the U.S. and China. Calls to the campaign's press office for comment were not immediately returned.
This post was updated at 12:12 PM PT to provide comment from Facebook.
Facebook is denying a report that it is chasing after Chinese social network Zhanzuo.com.
According to a Monday report in The Times, Facebook offered $85 million for Zhanzuo, which has about 7 million active users. (Facebook has slightly more than 50 million, about 100,000 of which are in China, according to The Times.)
While the newspaper cited a Facebook spokeswoman in reporting that Zhanzuo CEO Jack Zhang is "acquainted" with Mark Zuckerberg and that "there could be more information by the end of the month," a Facebook representative on Monday afternoon denied to CNET News.com that any such offer exists.
"No offer has been made, and no acquisition of any company in China is being considered by Facebook," the representative wrote in an e-mail. "We do not know who the spokeperson is that they are referring to in The Times story and were never contacted by the paper to confirm the accuracy of this story."
So far, Facebook's only major acquisition has been Parakey, a start-up founded by the creators of the Firefox browser. But rumors have circulated for weeks that the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company has been looking to expand into languages other than English, and international acquisitions are one way that Facebook could tackle that strategy.
An acquisition, additionally, would give Facebook a foothold in a market that has been politically difficult for many U.S. companies to enter. Yahoo recently came under government scrutiny over its role in providing information that landed two Chinese journalists in jail.
A Chinese Facebook would not be without competition. Facebook's chief rival, MySpace.com, launched a Chinese-language version of its site in 2006. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Times.) And social-networking site Friendster, which has consistently lost ground to Facebook and MySpace in the United States, has made surprising inroads in Asia; earlier this fall, Friendster launched a Chinese version of its site.
Social-networking pioneer Friendster might have been losing out to rivals Facebook and MySpace for some time now, but the company isn't giving up any time soon. The San Francisco-based company announced on Monday evening that its site is now available in traditional Chinese in addition to English.
This is a strategic move for Friendster, as numbers have shown that it's far from dead in the Asia-Pacific region, where 35 million of its 50 million users are based--in fact, ComScore numbers have indicated that with global growth taken into account, Friendster is growing more quickly than MySpace. Traditional Chinese, the company noted, is used by 16 percent of Internet users.
Unlike MySpace, which operates a number of international verticals in different languages, Friendster's Chinese version will exist atop the same domain as its English-language site. This way, English-speaking users will be able to network with Chinese-speaking users and vice versa.
According to a release from the company, "While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries and make it difficult or impossible to have international friend networks, Friendster is the first global online social network to employ this approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications among users around the world who are interested in doing so."
Social networking's other big name, Facebook, does not operate any versions of the site in languages other than English.
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