Alibaba and ByteDance Launch Interest-Oriented Social Apps
Taobao, an online shopping platform owned by Chinese internet giant Alibaba, recently launched an interest-oriented community app called “Yousha” (友啥 Yǒu Shá), reported by Xinyan Finance. Meanwhile, news and information content platform Toutiao, operated by Beijing-based ByteDance, is testing a smart reading app called “Shiqu” (识区 Shí Qū). Both products have a common feature: driving social interaction with personal interests, creating an interactive platform similar to friend circles.
Taobao and ByteDance’s new products have chosen to focus on vertical fields of interest-oriented social community. Yousha pays attention to recommending content to its users, hoping to encourage them to consume products on Taobao. ByteDance’s Shiqu focuses on reading content based on personal interests. Adopting high-quality content as the link and friend circles as the community of interest, it stimulates users’ reading, creates an interactive community and provides new traffic for Toutiao.
The Yousha app promotes itself as a “research institute” of good products with interesting trends, where people with similar preferences can gather to share high-quality items and get to know each other.
From the navigation bar at the bottom of the app, the main features of Yousha show users various recommended content, interest groups and the user’s personal center. The functional design of the product is relatively simple.
On the Yousha home page, users can see posts sent by others in different “research institutes” about good products. Users can comment and give the post a like. It also allows users to search for keywords to find related posts.
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On the other hand, Tech Planet previously reported that Toutiao is developing its smart reading product Shiqu, which has finally started small-scale testing recently. This app also has the social attribute of interest circles.
For Shiqu, users can only invite friends to register and log into the online reading community. After entering the recognition area, users can find interesting content circles in the navigation bar on the left side of the homepage. These circles are created by individual users, who can join different circles according to their reading hobbies and meet like-minded readers in the comments. It is worth noting that the content in the circle is captured by the system robots from Toutiao, which are uploaded by high-quality authors and media.
