DISQUS

Your Home Depot analogy is interesting.

In fact, the dominant Coles supermarket in Australia is just one example of retail outlets re-designing the store layout, in order to maximise not the raw amount of time customers spend in the store, but to maximise their exposure to strategic or high-margin goods.

Every time I visit my Facebook page to delete 'Vampire game' invitations, they get to collect some click/visit data and show me an ad. To some web companies, this is the most important thing in the world.

I concur with rod, the team would be incredibly valuable. There's little point buying Facebook.cn, translating the interface into Mandarin and expecting the US concept to work in an entirely different culture.

Even in Australia, where we use the Facebook.com site, the cultural differences from the US are noticeable. And annoying.

The distinguishing feature of China, against Australia, is that China's big enough to warrant its own social networking site/s.

It will also be interesting to see what the Chinese government asks of Facebook in return for letting it operate? Or perhaps Zhanzuo is a way for Facebook to profit from Chinese social networking population, without having to deal directly with the government, and without irritating the nationalist government.

There are at least some synergies in terms of back-end software and management, without turning Zhanzuo into "Facebook China".