QQ

The Chinese Facebook equivalent.  Pretty cool I suppose.  Like Facebook in that it has the timeline and you can upload pictures and has an IM system.  Like Myspace in that you can pimp out your page so it looks customized and stupid.  Everybody in China is on it though.  I have a QQ now of course, have a few coworkers and people I’ve met on there.  It’s funny, you don’t add people by name, but you get a unique QQ number when you sign up.  I asked someone why and they said that there are so many Chinese people and so many with the same names that if you looked by name it would be impossible to find anyone.  You can actually search by real name but you also need to know a bunch of information like birthday, favorite movie, blood type,  mother’s maiden name, etc.  Haha. It’s actually pretty close to that for real though. 

It’s definitely useful to have out here, good way to contact people as everyone is pretty much on it all times through their smart phones.  It’s also a good way to make friends as people are more willing to give up their QQ than their phone number to a new person.  The only downside is that it’s all in Chinese…running the website through the google chrome translator helps a bit, but it’s still hard to figure out a lot of the things because not everything gets translated and not everything gets translated properly.  It’s ok though, all part of the experience.