City!N (read CityIN), is a new China-based social networking site preparing to launch on March 14th.
So what makes it special? Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat explains that when users set up their profiles they will be listing things they like, such as movies, music, celebrities and so on and then will assign each thing a rating. City!N’s recommendation engine will then kick in and take your ratings and compare them to other users in your geographical region and show you the matches of who they think you might like to get in contact with.
City!N is using this kind of system because of something it learned around the time of its first beginnings. After receiving an undisclosed amount of angel funding in 2007 from a Chinese entrepreneur, the company launched two small networks to start testing their software. What they quickly learned was that what students liked in one city wasn’t synonymous as another city. Naturally, this led to geographic friend recommendations.
The company currently has 11 employees, including a former software engineer from E-Trade, Simon Chan, who is confident that, should Facebook ever come to China, they could take them on. For now the site is only launching in Chinese, but they do have plans to expand to English language support at some point in the future.
