In China, Facebook Tests the Waters With a Stealth App<br />The country boasts an audience of more than 700 million internet users who buy $750 billion of stuff online a year, but they are served by local tech companies<br />that have developed their own way of doing business that can seem exotic to Silicon Valley.<br />Now Colorful Balloons gives the Silicon Valley company a way to see how Chinese users digitally<br />share information with their friends or interact with their favorite social media platforms.<br />The 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<br />that is widely used by WeChat and other apps in the country<br />To change that, Mark Zuckerberg has made a big point of meeting with Chinese politicians, reading stodgy<br />Communist Party propaganda, studying Mandarin and — perhaps more daunting — speaking it in public.<br />It is registered to an address in eastern Beijing, yet the room number listed in company registration<br />documents could not be found amid a series of shabby, small offices on the building’s fourth floor.<br />The app was released in China by a company called Youge Internet Technology, according to a post in Apple’s app store.<br />Colorful Balloons instead links users through China’s biggest social network, WeChat.
