Ren Media
Ren Media
Published on 9th February 2010
Douban (豆瓣) www.douban.com is a popular Chinese social media site ( ranked 24th in China) with over 30 million unique users a month. It started about five years ago and has all the now common features of social media sites such as groups, the ability to "friend" others, etc.Douban users tend to be between 20-35 years old and single. Mostly into arts, films, music and other cultural stuff.
The CEO of the site Ah Bei claims that: "Douban has never been an SNS site; it has a community or social networking community. Perhaps it’s a social network based on books, or on movies, but Douban is broader than that."
(See the whole interview on Danwei.org http://goo.gl/1tr7 for more from Ah Bei).
Where it differs from most is that it's also the biggest online book, film and music database in China. (more than two million) The site primarily acts as a user review and recommendation service for films, books, and music. Users can run online events, rate, review and share stuff they like and listen to music, via the newly introduced Douban Radio. (豆瓣电台)
Douban Radio is a music player with a database of uploaded songs. It plays these songs at random according to your "perceived" taste. If you don’t like the song, you can dump it; in time, Douban Radio learns your tastes and begins to cater to them more accurately.
Douban is one of our favorite sites at Ren Media because of it's usability and intelligent, culturally aware users. Give it a try, you might surprise yourself. (but don't forget to learn mandarin first) ;-)
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