I Love China

Xiao Nei (校内) is a popular Chinese online networking website.  Users can find old college buddies, chat online and see what their friends are up to.  You can write on people’s walls, send them messages, join various networks and there are even fun applications you can install.

Sadly, Xiaonei.com is only available in Chinese but don’t worry if Chinese isn’t your forte.  One bright Harvard University student, Mark Zuckerberg, has copied this idea into English and called it Facebook.

It was initially only available to Harvard University students, but it is now available to everyone.  You probably haven’t heard of Facebook yet, but WoAi predicts that it will become very popular one day!

I’m not a big Facebook fan, I use it moderately rather than spending 25 hours a day glued to it like many people, but it is useful to be able to see what friends are up to from their Facebook captions. And following my little KFC incident, it’s nice to see that that I’m not the only angry laowai having a bad China day. Here’s what one of my English friend’s (living in Shanghai) had as her caption the other day:

“….. hated her trip to Tesco … esp when the woman tried to pay for her stuff when mine was still being scanned through!!!!”

Sorry to hear that love, but it does happen here quite a bit. And as a pre-emptive strike against our new friend, Richard Guy, I suppose I should point out that a bit of queue jumping here in Shanghai is certainly a lot more preferable to what happens in supermarkets in England, where a 57 year old man was killed just a few days ago!