Yahoo China, operated by the nation's largest e-commerce firm Alibaba.com Corp, launched its social networking service yesterday, ahead of the Chinese version of My Space which aims to enter China later this year.

The Yahoo Space (i.yahoo.com.cn), a revised version of Yahoo Inc's Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Group (club.yahoo.com.cn), combines its existing services like online photo album and instant messenger with new functions like video and audio chatting.

"Yahoo China has taken a further step towards making it a community-oriented site," said Zeng Ming, Yahoo China president, yesterday.

The new package will help produce more user-generated contents such as discussion and interest group to allow more interaction, while the contents are accessible with its search engine.

Zeng believed that the community-oriented service will increase users' loyalty and the number of users through a word-of-mouth promotion. Since a public trial in February, Yahoo Space has drawn in more than 1.3 million users.

Tao Ran, a spokesman for Alibaba, said the company will delete contents which are "obviously against Chinese laws", if there are any.

Yahoo China, which was taken over by Zhejiang Province-based Alibaba in 2005, has been revamping its business since. Its search business has been losing market share to Baidu.com and was overtaken by Google Inc last year.

Last year Beijing-based Baidu launched its blogging service, named Baidu Kongjian, or Baidu Space.

MySpace.com, the world's most popular social networking site that News Corp bought for US$580 million in July 2005, plans to enter China before July, company officials have said previously.

Editor: Yan