[Veratyr]

I went exploring the Chinese half of the internet for a while. It's amazing how different things are there, yet how similar they are.

Baidu seems essentially equivalent to Google, AliPay to PayPal and Weibo to Facebook.

As for differences, I noticed were how heavily integrated AliPay (and all the payment methods) were with the regular Chinese banking system, needing a local bank card to verify any account.

Also interesting how they handled file sharing. Baidu Pan seems to be the Chinese alternative to torrents or P2P.

Really though, the biggest take away I got was the inconceivable amount of information that isn't displayed to Westerners in search. The Chinese internet, with over 700m users, must be enormous but your average Western internet user doesn't see any of it.

[d33]

Interesting, I'd love to read more about it! What's this Baidu Pan thing?

[gbog]

Baidu Pan is a kind of online MFS, a distributed file system. It is very convenient inside China for "instant torrenting": if the file you want is already in the cloud you get it instantly. Also, it's free, you get 500G for $0 IIRC.