Douban – A Chinese Book, Music and Movie Recommendation Thing

Douban is a Chinese book, music and movie recommendation community. It was born in fall of 2004 by Bo Yang, a bilingual book worm, partly out of frustration that he could not find anyone in Beijing to talk about his new English books with. It was decided that a pilot version should be made in Chinese. Douban.com (alpha of course) went live on March 6, 2005, from a $800 home-made server hosted in the cheapest datacenter in Shanghai – quite amazing.

 

By December douban.com has attracted over sixty thousands registrations from Chinese speakers all over the world, over a million collections and ratings, and over 13,000 full-length reviews. The almost identical English version, douban.net, went on public testing on December 6, 2005. Douban also has a blog.

 

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