Pinterest Clones Explore China’s “Interest Graph”

The Pinterest sharing model is the latest trend in China’s startup scene, with no less than 20 Pinterest clones in existence. Some of them are following the classic cloning route, changing the UI only thinly, while the more intelligent clones are leveraging the Pinterest interface design for more outright commercial practices (like social shopping).

The entire concept focuses on building users based on interests rather than social networks, and it’s opened up new doors for China’s social startups.

The Ups and Downs of Lite Blogs

Early in 2011, a popular trend was cloning Tumblr, which also builds an audience around shared user interests. At the time, the most popular clone was Diandian, a startup by Jack Xu and later Lofter by NetEase, one of China’s top portal sites. And Sina Weibo and Renren has also launched lite blogs within their existing social networks, Qing and Renren Stations. Oh, and let’s not forget that even failing SNS-turned-lite-blog 51.com did too, although that’s a lost cause.

As 2011 came to a close, most of them did not experience explosive growth as they expected, and some withered away whiles others’ traffic is declining somewhat.

Nevertheless the lite-blog form of interest-based social networking has sparked new concepts in China’s internet industry, especially among startups.

Commercial Use of the Pinterest Model

At the start of second quarter in 2011, Pinterest clones were already emerging. What caught my attention was 2 particular startups: Mogujie.com (蘑菇街 - Mushroom Street) and Meilishuo.com (美丽说 – Beauty Story).

Fundamentally, they are the exact same service with well, different UI and names. What’s interesting is that instead of offering the whole web space to “pin” contents from these two sites are limiting users specifically to Taobao.com, China’s largest eCommerce site.

Users can clip (pin) products to their accounts which of course are completely open for public viewing. They can “Like” the clippings of others, and clicking on an individual clipping in Mogujie offers the pricing of this product and a tab to “Buy Now” that links directly to its page on Taobao.com.

Mogujie.com

For Meilishuo, the individual clipping page is more socially integrated with the content provider’s information and other albums she has created (it’s no secret that these two sites attract way more female users than males).

Meilishuo.com

Of course, these contents could all be shared to Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo too. ON Sina Weibo they have met with very positive feedback with thousands of retweets and comments in some instances.

And when looking at both Mogujie and Meilishuo traffic on Alexa (just as an extremely broad indicator), you can see they are performing extremely well.

Other Pinterest Clones

Other more ‘traditional’ Pinterest clones in China include Qihu 360′s (NYSE: QIHU) Woxihuan.com (我喜欢 – I Like), Huaban.com (花瓣 – Flower Pedals) and iCaitu.com (爱采图 – Love Clipping). These sites are less commercially-orientated than the two sites above. They follow more closely follow the Pinterest formula and open up the whole world wide web for clipping.

Looking at their traffic, Huaban.com is holding the top position and Woxihuan.com being the latest newcomer with considerably less traffic volume.

The Coming of Interest Graph

Back in 2008, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Social Graph concept, later in 2010 Open Graph was launched which Pinterest is now a part of. Social Graph is the concept of analyzing user interactions through their social relations with each other and how contents are spread through their social networks.

Perhaps it’s now the time to look more closely at the user’s personal interests or preferences as Mogujie and Meilishuo have pioneered by providing a clipping board for the ladies to share their products of interest. The new social networks are being formed around shared interests, and the race for China’s “interest graph” is on.