Facebook may enter China through acquisition

Instead of expanding into foreign markets on its own like MySpace, Facebook appears to be taking the acquisition route instead.

The Times of London reported over the weekend that the second largest social networking site had been in talks with Chinese site Zhanzuo.com, which counts about seven million users.

A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to the Times that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Zhanzuo CEO Jack Zhang had been in contact, but stopped short of acknowledging any deal. She did offer that more information may be available by the end of this month.

However, an American spokesperson for Facebook later denied the report outright, saying they weren't aware who had spoke to the paper.

Zhanzuo is China's largest social networking site, and Zuckerberg is said to have offered $85 million for it. Facebook has about 100,000 users in the country on its English-language site, and recently bought facebook.cn, leading some to believe it may be about to enter the market.

Of course, any site will have to deal with China's strict net censorship policies. On top of that, while an acquisition may make good business sense on paper, it may not be good for Facebook's reputation.

Yahoo found that out earlier this year after it was heavily criticized for assisting China in jailing Internet writers for subversion. It recently settled with those families.

MySpace has already launched in the region, opening its Chinese site in April of this year. However, analysts said it is too soon to assess whether the launch has been a success.