With 4 Million Users, Is TuDing the Closest to Being China’s Instagram?

The inevitable rush to build an Instagram-like photo-sharing app that’s localized for China has resulted in a nice, wide variety of apps and services. But there seems to be one winner so far, with a claimed four million users – and that’s TuDing.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s a rare overseas success story, being made by GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), a Finnish company with a long track-record in location-based technology. It’s TuDing app – it means ‘thumbtack’ in Chinese – is one of the most well-developed, social, and cross-platform of all the local photo-sharing services, supporting sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Kaixin, Renren, and more; it has apps for iPhone, Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry. In terms of third-party logins, it allows usage via six local social media platforms.

The TuDing app for iPhone.

GeoSentric has made it an international product, too, which it markets worldwide under the TudingMe name.

A few other tidbits about TuDing: of its four million users, about 20 percent use the service in some way once a week, and they have now amassed over 6 million photos which are uploaded at the rate of five per minute. Those numbers were revealed to the local tech news site 36kr, but it’s not clear if all those users are based in China. But that doesn’t matter too much, as other Chinese social photo apps such as PhotoSola – which was acquired by Baidu last month – have been gaining users in other countries too.

The Finnish company clearly nows how to do business in China, having formed a joint-venture with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) in June of this year to form Gypsii Shanghai (GSSH), which operates all of Sina’s location-based services such as its Weilingdi, a check-in service loosely tied to its Weibo platform

Give TuDing a try, starting by getting one of its mobile apps from its homepage.

[Source: 36kr – article in Chinese]