In 2015, a news titled “Renren, Curtain call Begins” caused quite a stir on the Internet. The news originated from Renren’s announcement to shut down its in-site messaging system, which caused netizens to make sad comments. Later, Chen yizhou responded and announced that he would adjust the in-station message upgrade program, suspend the in-station message function upgrade, and promised to permanently retain the in-station message content. Even in the face of the support of renren users, Chen Yizhou said: as long as your youth continues to shine, our struggle will not stop!
Yet Renren sold the company anyway, for $20 million.
Founded at the end of 2005, Xiaonei has enjoyed its best years since it was renamed Renren. However, renren, which is dominated by campus relationships, has been on the decline due to the impact of new social networking platforms.
In August 2013, Happy Farm was officially offline from renren’s open platform. In 2015, the station letter ushered in its last days. In 2018, Renren was officially sold. After 13 years, what was once called “China’s Version of Facebook” has not been a success story.
The 2015 blockbuster was just the beginning of the end, though Renren vehemently denied it. In August of the same year, Chen yizhou became the director of Beijing Duoniu Interactive Media Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as Duoniu Media), and sold Renren to Duoniu Media three years later. Perhaps 2015 has begun to find a way for Renren, and it is no coincidence that it is being sold today.
Renren 13 years, from glory to collapse, like a youth dream. From a false alarm three years ago to today’s curtain call come true, from the struggle to happy renren to find a new home, people sigh.
Renren curtain call, but also let onlookers think about the future of social platforms.
The history of social platform is a revolutionary history of Internet information dissemination
After the barbaric era of BBS and the enclosure movement of various blogs, social network SNS, based on the six dimensions of space theory, has been in full swing.
To be able to get a comprehensive outbreak, mainly the Internet dissemination of information change. In BBS and blog era, there is no threshold for content production, lack of content sorting and dissemination mechanism, and a large amount of information is submerged. At the same time, in the PC era, mainstream websites are content-centric, while acquaintances are impenetrable on the web. With the emergence of social network SNS, people’s online experience and information dissemination have been greatly improved by using relationship chain as filtering mechanism and information flow as content distribution.
Xiaonei changed its name to Renren, and China’s SNS network reached its heyday. But the way the Internet spreads information is still in continuous breakthrough and innovation.
At that time, in the field of instant messaging a ride of the dust QQ, QQ alumni online. Qzone applications rose rapidly, and Qzone quickly gained a crushing victory in terms of user volume. QQ’s huge network of relationships leaves Renren in the dust.
The social platform landscape has not been consolidated by the end of the SNS war. In renren, QQ space competition SNS who is the first, founded xiaonei Wang Xing in the field of micro blog fired the first shot. The subsequent rise of microblogs ignited a frenzy for land grabs. SNS representative network, left QQ space encroaches on the market share, right by the rise of weibo flanked.
Later, the advent of the mobile Internet era and the emergence of wechat accelerated the decline of SNS platforms.
Since the launch of wechat in 2011, it took 433 days for Ma huateng to announce the breakthrough of 100 million users. Although we lost the first-mover advantage in the battle of Weibo, in 2012, wechat completed the upgrade from a communication tool to a social platform with the launch of “Moments of Friends” and the official emergence of a mobile phone-based social circle of acquaintances, which hit Weibo and Renren hard. In less than two and a half years, wechat has become the dominant social network.
QQ and wechat are two powerful social protection tools that make Tencent’s social empire unshaken.
In the social world, players are like a river. Looking back at the development and changes of social platforms, it is the evolution of Internet information transmission. Users are nodes in the network, and social platforms connect nodes in different ways. Platforms give value to users who can share and spread information, and users fill the platform with content.
From BBS to SNS, from Weibo to wechat, all platforms are trying to solve three problems. One is how to connect users; Second, how to improve user efficiency, and third, how to improve user duration. These three issues have been explored throughout the development cycle of social platforms.
Even wechat, the dominant social network, is worried about the loss of users caused by the rising popularity of social shows. So social platforms, big and small, will continue to figure out how to keep users within their boundaries.
Algorithmic recommendations drive social media revolution
With more than 100 million users, Tencent has become an oligopoly in the social space, but the wave of social entrepreneurship is not over. There has been no shortage of newcomers to the social pie. After the launch of wechat moments, only four months later, intelligent recommendation based on data mining, toutiao, claiming to be “not a news producer, but a news porter”, suddenly appeared.
From the launch to 2015, Todaytoutiao has completed the scale of the product, and the product functions have been constantly enriched. By the end of the first half of 2015, Toutiao has become the second largest client after Tencent News by algorithm recommendation.
In the second half of 2015, toutiao began to launch its own account. Toutiao began to expand from content distribution to content creation. Toutiao no longer hides its social ambitions. As of February this year, Toutiao had about 1.05 billion users worldwide, and about 900 million after the restructuring. Among them, Toutiao has around 120 million DAUs and its users spend 54 minutes online on average, making it the second largest national App after wechat.
Taking advantage of the mobile Internet, Toutiao has expanded rapidly, splitting short video business from toutiao system, and even gaining overseas territory through investment or self-establishment. As of February, Toutiao App had more than 10 million overseas users in North America, Brazil, Japan, Southeast Asia and other regions.
Wechat is so entrenched in the social space that there are imitators and innovators. Starting with algorithmic recommendation, Toutiao introduced social relations and developed a methodology that has been repeatedly reused by the whole toutiao department, leading a new mainstream mode of information distribution. The rise of Toutiao threatens not only wechat’s dominance but also sina Weibo, the microblogging leader, and Baidu, the search engine’s big brother. Companies are jumping on the headline-making bandwagon.
The success of Toutiao represents the advantage of a model, which also proves once again that the transformation of social platforms is the transformation of Internet information dissemination.
Instant messaging emerged to improve point-to-point communication when content-centric relationships could not be penetrated. If you want people to stick around, you have to offer enough content to keep them there. So there are microblog, wechat public number and other tools. Information flow allows people to share content freely. When there is too much information and people cannot filter information, algorithm-driven information flow emerges. By analyzing people’s preferences and interests through big data, people can obtain personalized information.
As major social platforms and news clients increase the online algorithm recommendation, this will also cause new contradictions. Users controlled by social platforms do not have the right to choose information independently, and passively accept the preferred content arranged by the platform. One day, the irrelevant content brought by algorithm recommendation will be criticized by users. But social products will continue to explore new mechanisms to bridge this gap.
Innovation is still the dominant theme in the social space
Social software brings different mobile social experience feast to users. Powerful social apps like wechat still have an unreachable audience. In addition to toutiao, the dark horse, and Tencent battle, there are many new players in the social arena high-profile debut.
Neither neo-economic liberalism, the most mainstream in the West, nor traditional Keynesian economics has found a solution to “winner-takes-all”. So the constant demise and creation of social software speaks to the appeal of the social space. In this year’s online bullet message, once more than wechat heat.
Everyone has discussed whether bullet message can subvert wechat. The reason why we have so much hope for bullet messages is that “the world is suffering from wechat for a long time”, and the biggest highlight of bullet messages is the high accuracy of voice input, which is converted into text by voice, so that sending and receiving information can be more intuitive and efficient.
Thanks to the advantages of the software itself and the inherent media attributes of the founder Luo, the total number of activated users of Bullet message exceeded 4 million in the tenth day after its release, and it has completed the financing of 150 million yuan in just three days since its debut, becoming the “fastest project financing over 100 million yuan in history”. Bullet messages like fireworks, after the release of dazzling light, quickly turn cool.
The end of the social field is never to overturn wechat, because wechat has its own bottlenecks. Wechat, born in the era of mobile Internet, is a typical platform subversion of hardware facilities. After 7 years of development, the ecosystem established by wechat is not a social platform that can be easily overturned, but users also have a “seven-year itch” for the platform, from the original crazy adding wechat friends to strangers in the deleted address book, wechat public number activity is also decreasing. After seven years of racing, they hit the ceiling.
Once established, chains of acquaintances are hard to shift, but a new generation of Internet users has grown up, with their own circles and conversational skills, and a generation of tycoons is showing signs of fatigue in the face of a fickle, articulate new generation. Tencent’s frenzied bet on short videos is also a sign of its anxiety about the future.
The Internet has created Facebook, Twitter, wechat and other large social platforms. These platforms controlled by centralized organizations manage the production, dissemination and sharing rules of the platform content by gathering hundreds of millions of users, so that users will have traffic, creating an ecosystem of self-feeding and generating continuous profits.
Because of this, the world’s tech giants almost all have a dream of social, social is the basis for other businesses, the layout of the giant in the social sector one after another, onlookers salivate.
There will always be wars in the social space, disruption and rebirth. What the future of social products will look like, and whether wechat will be disrupted in the future, is unknown. But the theme must be constant innovation. Each era has its own characteristics. Only innovation can keep us from falling behind in the trend of The Times.
Science and technology we media “Zhai Caihua”, subscription number: Zhai Caihua, personal wechat account Zhaicaihua002, reprinted copyright reserved, rights reserved.