Kaixin001 is a Chinese social networking website launched in April 2008. After one year success operation, it is the top1 Chinese SNS now. According to Alexa Traffic Rankings, it is the 16th most popular website in China by March 2009.

Different from Xiaonei, Hainei, and other Chinese SNS, Kaixin001 is not a localized copy of Facebook. It has limited amount of applications which mostly developed by Kaixin001 itself. All those 30+ apps are quite unique and fully fit Chinese young people’s culture and user experience.

Currently, the most popular app is the “House & Garden“. Garden is a newly-added function on the original House app, which makes the whole app become very popular now.

The original House is something similar as The Sims. Players can buy and arrange virtual furniture for their “house”. It is pretty interesting. However, players cannot interact with each others. Now, smart Kaixin001 developers add the Gardan function to enhance the engagement and interaction.

Engagement

There are total 32 types of crop (vegetable and fruit) seeds. Players can only buy several ones at beginning. They need to keep playing the game to achieve a higher level so as buy more different seeds.

It takes 12-1080 hours to make various seeds become ripe crops. So the players need to explore the website frequently to check the status of their crops.

Interaction

The most interesting and interactive element for this app is that players are able to go to their friends’ garden to steal the ripe crops, in case the owners forget to reap them. I made below video to show the process:

Many newspapers, magazines, and TV programmes reported it. Now the “Garden and Steal Crops” is more than a popular SNS application, it has become a phenomenon among Chinese young people. In some reports, it is said that some teenagers are playing this app overnight and somebody even set up alarm clock to get up early in the morning to reap their crops. It is not healthy (I wholly against it), but at least, such phenomenon indicates the great popularity of this application.

Engagement and interaction is the core of this app, and it is the soul for Chinese SNS (besides networking).