Facebook tries luck with Colorful balloons

China’s security officials test the way and means on how internet addresses of services hosting or using illegal content work in their country. Once found the irregularity, the authorities would ask internet service providers to tell their clients to stop. If the clients doesn’t act rightfully, they said, the service providers and Chinese officials would cut their connection in a matter of minutes, which includes making some news websites inaccessible and passing rules that result in app removals - has left big players like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter and Gmail are all blocked in the country for years.

With an audience size of more than 700 million internet users who buy $750 billion of stuff online a year in China, but they are served by local tech companies that have developed their own way of doing business that can seem exotic to Silicon Valley. Facebook is blocked in 2009 after ethnic unrest in western China and similarly, Instagram blocked in 2014 during protests that fall in Hong Kong and WhatsApp platform is also not widely used in China, where local messaging app WeChat dominates. Even so, WhatsApp provides encrypted messaging, making it a useful tool for many Chinese to communicate or do business outside the country or in Hong Kong.

Multiple efforts by Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook in learning the Chinese language and efforts to discuss over dine with President Xi Jinping during a state visit to the United States. Recently, Facebook opened its first data center in China to comply with the law that calls for companies to store their data in China.

Facebook has finally managed to sneak into China to see how Chinese users digitally share information with their friends or interact with their favorite social media platforms. “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways,” Facebook said in a statement. Hope the internet regulators of China were aware of the app’s existence.

The app was released in China by a company called Youge Internet Technology from a source. The Colorful Balloons, with the photo sharing app, which is designed to collate photos from a smartphone’s photo albums and then share them, does so in China with the use of a QR Code, a sort of bar code that is widely used by WeChat and other apps in the country. For example, people who post photos from Colorful Balloons on WeChat will see a link that lets other users download Facebook’s Chinese app. But the link does not work, meaning people have to seek out Colorful Balloons in an app store instead of grabbing it from their friends, which may limit its distribution.

Tags: Facebook, Colorful balloons, Mark Zuckerberg Founder Facebook, mark zuckerberg facebook, President Xi Jinping, messaging app WeChat