• Reuters, Wednesday, August 24, 2011 12:10 PM

Microsoft's MSN this week announced a partnership with Chinese social-networking site Renren. The goal? "To cooperate in areas of instant messaging and social networking," according to Reuters. The strategy? "The two companies will cooperate on providing universal log-in access to both platforms and cross sharing of photos and status updates," Reuters writes.

The specifics? The agreement will see a significant level of integration between the two platforms. Said Renren's chief operating officer Liu Jian in a statement: "Renren's alliance with MSN network is in the spirit of a win-win situation." Seeking success where others (i.e., Google) have found failure, Microsoft has recently focused it global expansion efforts on China.

Last month, the software giant said it would partner with Baidu to provide the Chinese Web-services company with English-language search. By the numbers, China is a very attractive market for any tech company. As Reuters notes, it's the world's largest Internet market by users with around 480 million "netizens," while around 230 million of them use social networking sites, and 385 million of them use instant messaging.

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