Taobao.com has recently also joined the camp of SNS and launched the Beta version of its SNS product, jianghu.taobao.com. Taobao.com itself is a comprehensive shopping community that combines the sellers and buyers together.  This SNS function will without any doubt increase users’ dependency and tendency on taobao.
 
For the moment, you could not log on taojianghu.taobao.com by registration, and you could access it through invitation. There are also just several applications, like favorites, voting, blog, photo album, exchange center, etc, plus another two online game modules, “friends’ jidsaw” and “tao girls & boys”, some of which, however, have quite distinguishing features of its own.
 
Take “favorites” for instance, from which you could not only see the commodities and stores that have been added to  your “favorites”, but also that of your friends’. The original intention for this design is no bad, but it lacks the function of hidding. Once you activate the taojianghu.taobao.com, all the things in your “favorites” are clearly in a row. This, for those who want protection of privacy, is not a good choice.

Another characteristic feature is its exchange center, where you could exchange coupon with Taobao golden coins, with the face value ranging from CNY3, 5, 10 to 20 (around 0.44, 0.74, 1.47, and 2.94 USD respectively), and all could be earned from renewing your personal data, inviting your friends, posting a vote, etc.

In a vote posted by Taobao web master, a series of applications are listed out, like Buyer Show (you could see what your friends just bought), Initiation (including online group procurement, offline gatherings and mutual sharing), Sharing, Journals, and Subscription Reading. Some of them are closely related to the C2C feature of taobao.com, while application like Journals is the most basic one for websites of SNS type. From this we could see that Taobao is not going to turn taojianghu.taobao.com into a community completely similar to xiaonei.com. It’s supposed just to serve for taobao.com and strengthen users’ dependency and tendency on taobao.com. Websites like xiaonei.com and kaixin001.com could therefore easy off a little bit now.

Even thought there remains much for improvement, the under-beta-testing taojianghu.taobao.com still has several remarkable aspects. Its applications will be enriched according to the survey on users’ requirement conducted by web master. If you really like taobao.com and want no privacy for your favorites, then you shall never miss it.