Bloggers lament the end of utopia as Facebook prepares its Chinese language entry into the marketplace of Babel.

One story caught the attention of the ever-vigilant and has been creating a stir throughout the blogosphere. Last month, an “industry insider” was cited as saying that Facebook would launch a Chinese version of its site perhaps as early as this December (digitalwatch.ogilvy.com.cn). Furthermore, the report indicated that rather than create a Chinese language version of its own site like Myspace, Facebook, instead, would acquire an existing SNS in China.

While taking over a copycat site like Xiaonei.com has a number of perfectly benign advantages (e.g. not even having to change the font or colors), there is widespread speculation that the greatest incentive for would be the internal “user content management” mechanisms already in place. Web watchdogs are railing against the prospect of having a Chinese Facebook that is different from the international version, fueling discussion about imminent fragmentation of the Internet.

Rebecca Mackinnon, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and former Beijing bureau chief for CNN, has blogged extensively on virtual communities (rconversation.blogs.com). She believes that offering separate sites with different access to communities and information will have a detrimental effect on cultural communication between China and the rest of the world. “If they do end up having to create different Facebook ‘silos’…, it isn’t just a missed opportunity to provide a great global, multilingual service that many people would find incredibly exciting,” she pronounces. “The silo-ing of social networking sites like Facebook (and MySpace China already) is a sadly missed opportunity to build bridges of communication and understanding between the Chinese-speaking world and the English-speaking world.”

Mackinnon cites a recent study that sampled five million web pages from 15,000 websites in China sporting a total of 40 million external hyperlinks (those pointing outside their website) which shows the Chinese Internet is predominantly “local” with only six percent of hyperlinks pointing to websites abroad. Mackinnon believes that the greatest culprit in this “ghettoization” (as she has dubbed it) is legal restriction, although she allows that the linguistic aspect is indeed “non-trivial.” Blognation expands on the “geo-network” reasons for China’s locally centered Internet: “The Web inside China feels more like an intranet. Why is it that I can access any local website ‘just like that,’ whereas a click on a link outside Chinese frontiers can create waits of up to 20—sometimes even 30—seconds and more?”

Mackinnon laments the legal restraints which will leave Chinese net users outside international 2.0 circles and regularly makes use of the emotionally charged terms “silo-ing,” “Balkanizing,” and “ghettoization.” These terms certainly polarize, but other media observers are not as convinced the present situation merits such drama. “Is six percent really a woefully low percentage considering the percentage of Chinese people that can effectively navigate English-language material?” asks social media analyst, Jason Lee. Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei.org suggests another way of looking at the issue: “I suspect that just a tiny minority of American Internet users use non-American websites, and that the proportion of native English speakers who use websites in foreign languages is even smaller … So, who is really in a ghetto?”

Blogging about Facebook’s entry in China, Mackinnon offers the stern warning that “this ghettoization and Balkanization may be in the short term interest of governments and businesses, but it's definitely not in the long-term interest of human beings.” Whether or not the long-term interests of human beings will in fact be ill served, it seems that even from a business standpoint, Facebook may be compromising one of its greatest assets if it sets up an entirely separate Chinese version. “Facebook’s large, diverse international user network is one of its major advantages over its competitors,” Lee explains. “QQ, Sina, Sohu, Xiaonei and ChinaRen already offer powerful communication and social networking tools, and don’t suffer the Internet delays common with foreign sites. If Facebook can’t offer that international access to future Chinese users, what kind of incentive do they have to join?” Think about that next time you refuse a friend request.