SubscribeCityIn: A Lifestyle Social Networks
CityIn.com is a new stealthy social networking site with a focus on lifestyle, event and interests, which is scheduled to be launched on March 13, 2008. It is still in private beta now, you cannot register it without invitation.
Why we need another social networking site? I have chance to talk with Simon Chan, founder of CityIn.com. He claimed that CityIn.com is not another SNS copycats in China, instead, it is a personalized and localized intelligent SNS, they differentiate themselves with innovative features that fit the tastes and interests of Asian (at this stage, Chinese) users.
Then what are the innovative features of CityIn.com? Simon said CityIN is the social network that personally understands ‘you’, “When users browse through items listed under ‘Interests’, they can choose or add anything they like, e.g. a movie, a car brand or a celebrity. They can rate these items and see the ratings given by their friends or schoolmates. Users are then recommended to make friends with people who share similar interests and backgrounds locally, rate other interests which they may also like, or join local events that they may enjoy.”
Simon also believe that his previous experience with two small startups, including already dead Wazhua.com, has helped his team to fine-tune their recommendation engine and understand Chinese market better. He said, “For instance, what a student in Guangzhou prefers may be exactly opposite to that of a student in Beijing, and in CityIN we try our best to cater for different preferences”.
Based on what Simon said, I cannot help thinking it as a lifestyle Douban. While Douban recommends books, movies and music albums to you based on your rates and tastes, and help you to find people who share similar interests, CityIn expands it to wider range, cover celebrities, brands and others. Is it enough to attract users to join this new social networks? I personally not optimistic about it. A good recommendation engine is helpful, but far from enough.
Some screenshots of CityIn.com.
CityIn local event information page
CityIn interest recommendation page
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This sounds stale. I don’t mind signing in to use advanced functionality on sites that offer content, but being forced to sign in before getting ANYTHING of value from a website is a complete turn off.
Best wishes to Simon Chan and his crew, but a first step would be making it clearer in their PR efforts why people would use this over Craigslist. Are we all so inundated with concerts that we need a machine to help us pick?
[...] Source: http://www.cwrblog.net/999/cityin-a-lifestyle-social-networks.html [...]
Can i have a invitation? I like it, I want to have a look. Thank u ! My mail is “yydy.gao@gmail.com”
Tangos, thanks for writing about CityIN. CityIN.com has officially launched today, though it remains invitation-only to ensure the quality of friendship in the social network.
Trevelyan: Thanks for your comment. The use of AI could definitely help the user experiences. Take a look at Amazon’s recommendation engine, and the complains of Facebook about its messy content. Of course, we will continue to improve our other services for even better user experiences.
Yydy: I have sent you an invitation.
[...] Specialized SNS seems to be the way things are going these days. A former colleague of mine from Red Herring (business side, not the editorial side) has a very promising franchise based SNS for individual cities like Tianjin or Guangzhou, or for interest groups like car aficionados. (Can’t say too much more about it right now, but I’ll profile them on this blog one of these days). Later this week I’ll be talking to Simon Chan about his new site CityIN, which is a recommendation-based, highly personalized urban lifestyle SNS which sounds very interesting from the write-up Tangos posted a few weeks back. [...]
[...] CityIn.com, a new SNS with some innovative features, continues adding new features since it launched about one month ago, such as face-detecting tech for photo tag. It now rolled out a new content aggregation feature, similar to what Hainei.com did. [...]