why do so many posts addressing Facebook's approach to China neglect the fact that FB is blocked by the great firewall and the vast majority of Chinese netizens won't bother with a vpn to use it regularly? am I missing something?
i agree, i think that's a huge disadvantage for FB, but doesn't mean that they should give up on breaking into the market. as mark mentioned at startup school, his approach is to adapt to the cultural norms and policies of foreign countries. perhaps they could start hiring from within the country and start garnering the favor of the gov? maybe release a closely monitored version of fb? overall, fb is good at hacking around problems and this is just another problem i think they can solve if they put the time and resources into it.
i'm curious to see whether this will happen, i've heard before the points you mention about Zuckerberg studying Chinese and all that, but as you say I don't see how FB can compete without spending at least 50% of their resources on China, considering the fact they already have massively entrenched incumbents (QQ/Tencent, renren, etc). i've also heard (from people more knowledgeable about these things than i) that Chinese gov is big on internet protectionism and co's like Baidu are heavily incentivized to oust the competition. anyway, this is just one tech-aware Beijing-based expat's opinion, FB getting a bigger market share in China would certainly make my life easier...