And now Myspace for China

By Vivek Puri | September 20th, 2006 at 10:18 am ET         

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is in China to help launch Chinese version of MySpace. Rupert Murdoch’s Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, will be working with the company’s executives to help with the launch. MySpace in China will work with various partners in this project who would own about 50 per cent of the venture. MySpace will be looking to avoid any political issues in China, such as those faced by Google and Yahoo. This site will have similar setup with users having the ability to share text, pictures and video.

“We have to make MySpace a very Chinese site,” Murdoch was quoted as saying Tuesday at a conference organized by investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “I have sent my wife across there because she understands the language.”

This will be a great move for MySpace that will give access to a very large user base. China has the second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with 123 million people online.

In related news, Yahoo Taiwan is also looking to have a bigger share in Chinese social networking space. Yahoo will be investing $6 million in Wretch.cc to become its biggest shareholder. Wretch is the biggest blog hosting and online photo album service provider, located in Taiwan. Wretch’s Alexa traffic ranking is 27.
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Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Myspace, SocialNetworking