Renren.com Sitemap
Similar with Facebook, Renren.com aims to provide users an easy way to connect with their schoolmates, friends, coworkers and families. So Renren.com possesses the key functions, which support personal communication among users' network. The using of news feed, album, share, status and wall are all pretty much the same with those on Facebook, except they are all in Chinese. However, there's one function - "journal" - which is not supported by Facebook. From my observation so far, there are a couple different kinds of journals which are usually updated by users. In some sense, it combines the idea of "blog".
1. Personal Feelings and Thoughts about recent life
For example, users would post a journal about their recent trip, with embedded pictures, music and videos. Also sometimes, they would like to write a short journal to share some happiness or sadness with their friends. From my perspective, I would like to regard it as a way to let out.
However, talking about personal life on social media doesn't work for everyone. For instance, who would want a friend he/she hasn't talked with for two years to know his/her own sadness and worries in recent life. Everyone is seeking for a balance between let out and privacy protection. So in this category, users can change the privacy setting. Most users would set up the privacy setting as "only can be viewed by friends", or "only can be viewed by selected friends".
Once users posted anything on their own profile page, it will be published on News Feed.
2. Comments and Reviews about news
Users could post comments about certain interesting news stories. This kind of posts is usually open to the public, which can be viewed and shared by everyone.
Regarding other functions and applications offered by Renren.com, there are two function that I need to highlight: Events and Public Profiles, which are the advertising on Renren.com.
Public profile pages can be created by celebrities, organizations and companies, as well as some news/media channels. Creating the pages is free; but Renren.com will charge the users fees based on the clickthrough rates.
The another function - Events - is not the same with the "events" on Facebook. Personal users can not send out invitations to their friends through events application on Renren.com. Only organizations and companies can plan, execute and publicize their events on Renren.com, which is an effective way to create buzz of their advertising campaigns with consumers. Further discussion about this will be on Advertising on Renren.com.
