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This article was published on January 21, 2009

China’s largest IM service QQ crosses borders: available in English


China’s largest IM service QQ crosses borders: available in English

When I traveled through China with Mike Butcher, Shel Israel, Christine Lu, Scoble, the guys from Web2Asia, and some other rather inspiring folks last November, we were all impressed by the massive user-base from the country’s largest services.

Blogger's tour
China 2.0 Blogger Tour

One of them is QQ, China’s largest IM service. Web2Asia‘s CEO Georg Godula showed us that QQ has 341.900.000 active users. Yeah! We’re serious here! Almost 342 million active users (also because users have multiple online identities and thus multiple accounts)!

Kenneth Tan, the man behind Gays.com (watch my co-editors Boris and Patrick’s take on this SNS) and editor of the blog Shanghaiist just mailed me to tell this IM giant is about ready to cross China’s borders. They’ve launched some English versions earlier, but this time it’s for real.

The new portal IMQQ.com will allow you to chat with your Chinese friends. Download the QQ2009 Beta for Windows or the Mac version 1.0 beta and start messaging, uhm, instantly.

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