Facebook Replacement? I suggest WeChat.

After all, a billion Chinese consumers can’t be wrong!

We added WeChat to our mix on a recent trip to China, and it seems like just what I wish Facebook et al would be — a super easy way to share ideas and media with friends, but without buckets of advertising, and as far as I could tell, without brain-dead algorithms deciding what I would and wouldn’t see.

On the face of it is an app — pretty much entirely on an Android or iPhone — that lets you chat with friends, or do a voice or video call. In practice after three weeks I was still finding surprising features like a scan to translate tool that was just fabulous.

Although I didn’t have time to look more deeply, I gather that WeChat can be expanded in all sorts of ways, and certainly a significant part of the Chinese economy relies on WePay for payment. In restaurants it’s not unusual to make your food order and pay for it in one transaction, all on your phone.

Obviously if you move to WeChat you also need to accept that the Chinese government is monitoring what you do, but is that really more annoying than what Google and Facebook are doing here?

Give it a try, and feel free to add me to your WeChat contacts. I’m appalbarry on their platform.