By Guest Writer Gang
Lu
FeedSky is the largest Chinese feed management
provider and has just launched its Beta 3. CEO Xinxin Lv described it to me as “mainly
a UI update with some performance enhancement”.
The web2.0 market is still quite young in China, but its concepts are rapidly
spreading throughout the country. The China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) reported that by August 2006,
the number of bloggers had reached approx. 17.485 million and 33.747 million blog spaces
had been registered. FeedSky’s main competitor, worldwide RSS service provider
Feedburner, reported in its Fast Facts and Stats that it has a total
of 506,278 feeds registered. But the Beijing-based FeedSky, launched in July 2005, has
just announced a company milestone – 1.5 million feeds have been registered and it
has partnerships with over 30 BSPs (Blog Service Provider) and 40 media companies
from mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan. Feedsky has become the dominant service
provider in the Chinese market and is probably going to be the largest feed management
provider in the world.
The Beta 3 version introduced an interesting WAP
service, which allows users to read registered feeds on a mobile handset. “The UI
update is a sign of our next round growing up”, Xinxin said – also noting that “a few
killer services will be launched very soon”. The next version is in private testing
currently. It is a major update and some social networking elements have been integrated
– e.g. users with the same interests can join a group and the feeds managed by a user
can be shared with others. Xinxin didn’t reveal further details to me, but I am really
looking forward to this upgrade.
Feedsky just closed its first round of venture funding. It is definitely one of the
key contacts, if someone wants to get into the Chinese blog market. Blog-based services
such as Google Blog Search are expected to
play a much more important role in the Chinese Internet Content market in 2007, so I will
not be surprised if there is a connection between Feedsky and these services –
particularly those from the western world.
