Renren at one point had a $740m initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2011.

Joseph Chen, who had himself tried to launch a student community website called ChinaRen as early as 1999 and sold it in 2000, acquired Xiaonei through his new company Oak Pacific in October 2006.

Born in 1970 in China, Chen moved with his family to the US where he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later earned an MBA from Stanford University.

[8] Xiaonei features an instant messaging service (Rénrénzhuōmiàn, Chinese: 人人桌面) designed typically for its users using XMPP, which is more popular than Facebook chat.

[12] In April 2020, Renren received a non-complicance letter from the New York Stock Exchange, and ultimately delisted in approximately December 2022.

The lack of any advance warning that the site was being brought down, possibly forever, led to a degree of outrage from users who had not backed up photos and other sentimentally valuable content stored on their accounts.

[15] Renren Inc. has its headquarters on the 23rd floor of the Jing An Center (S: 静安中心, T: 靜安中心, P: Jìng'ān Zhōngxīn) in Chaoyang District, Beijing.

Soon, such claim was spread all over various popular forums, QQ groups, and social networking sites like Xiaonei.

is quite commonly seen; the interacting users leaving and replying to messages is considered a prominent instance of basic communication on Renren.

However, Renren's censorship is fairly strict, especially to sensitive keywords in the blogs, compared with other SNS websites in China.

Blog entries containing keywords like Tiananmen Square Massacre, Falun Gong and Zhao Ziyang cannot be released.

Others that are suspected to be related to political topics, obscenity or thrillers are manually censored by administrators, delaying or blocking their release.

Nowadays, people show more preference to install this simple and smart program to log into Renren, browsing and sharing news with others, rather than login to the original webpage on browsers.

Unlike many other social networks, Renren has collaborated with academic researchers to understand the growth and structure of its user community.

The study also used Renren's unique feature, a per-user "recent visitors" log, to create an anonymous history of users and how they browse each other's profiles, which was the first of its kind.

A second study [23] detailed the process of analyzing and improving detection of fake users (also called Sybil accounts) on Renren.

Renren users earn "points" for various activities, such as logging in regularly, posting updates, and receiving comments and replies from contacts.

Due to some functions charging users fees, Renrendou can be used to purchase gifts, commence the Purple Bean service (紫豆服务), exchange for game coins and advertise.

Renren's parent company, Oak Pacific Interactive, launched a copy of Kaixin001 called Kaixin.