Sinobytes

Sina's Twitter-esque microblogging site: A closer look

Sep 18, 2009 22:09

China Web portal giant, Sina, has launched an invite-only beta of a very Twitter-like microblogging service.

It is the first time a major Chinese Web company has tackled microblogging. Previously, smaller Twitter clones Fanfou and Digu gained some traction among more tech-savvy Chinese Net users before being shut down by the Great Firewall during a widespread wipeout of social networking sites earlier this year.

Only one smaller local competitor, Zuosa, remains. As for Twitter itself, it is technically blocked in China, but most of its power users have realized that Twitter is still accessible via a number of Web apps such as HootSuite, iTweet and TweetZap.

Going for a test drive
Sina's new microblogging service is not yet ready and open to the public, but it has been in invite-only beta since mid-August. It has now had time to develop, and is ready for a test drive, I reckon, to see how it compares to Twitter, and how it stands on its own as a new form of Chinese social networking.

There is no special catchy name for Sina's new offering, since it is rather prosaically dubbed 新浪微博--xīnlàng wēi bó--which literally translates as "Sina microblog". Also, there are no "@ replies" or "retweets", as such; Sina instead has "comment" and "forward", respectively.

As there is no desktop or Web app for Sina's microblogging service, it is all done via the Web site--t.sina.com.cn--or by setting up your China-based mobile phone to "Tweet" via SMS. A very basic "WAP" (i.e. mobile) site also exists--at t.sina.cn--which seems to be optimized for older phones, not for 3G devices with more sophisticated Web browsers.

So, "tweeting" via the Web site is the only way to get the full experience. It looks a lot like Twitter--Sina's conversation-starting question is: "What new info do you wanna tell folks?"--as you can see in the image below from a "Tweet" of mine earlier today:

With there being no @ reply feature, which is key to Twitter, you instead "comment" on someone's message, sort of like a blog comment, as you can see I'm doing in the image below, commenting on one user's question about which browser one prefers to use:



"Retweets" are branded as "forward", and are not editable, but you can add your 2 cents to someone's message. Hashtags, thankfully, are supported in the new Sina service. There's also a built-in URL shortener: sinaurl.cn.

Celebrity tweets
Twitter has numerous celebrity Twitterers, but it seems to have all happened quite coincidentally. With Sina, though, it has been made part of the attraction early on. Currently number one with the most number of followers (13,224 at present)--or 粉丝/fěnsī/fans--is Lee Kai-fu, former head of Google China whose recent resignation was the subject of a recent post here on Sinobytes. Most of the other celebrities on Sina microblogs are pop-music and movie stars.

Similarly to Twitter, on this new Sina site, one's "contacts", "fans" and "microblogs" (i.e. updates) are accompanied by numbers, and a recent selection of the avatars of new "fans", as seen here:



Say what you like, or watch what you say?
One Sina microblog user I know found himself banned--or locked out--of Sina's microblog service earlier this week. David Feng, a Swiss-Chinese now living in China, who's also a regular Twitter user, was nonplussed at being effectively booted from Sina. "I'm still trying to find out the cause," said David, who also used Fanfou before it got shut down.

He describes Fanfou as having been "very free" despite having the proper government operating license. In contrast, it appears that Sina is--inevitably--playing absolutely by the rules as they're laid down and it appears that strict word filtering is in operation.

Sina will perhaps be wary that its microblogging thingy could go rogue, and be implicated in spreading rumors or sensitive information that displeases government censors, such as happened to Fanfou, Digu, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube this year. If it happens, it'll swiftly be shut down.

Fitting in
Sina's microblogs come into the portal's sizeable Web family, and needs to find a place. A number of users seem to already have a regular Sina blog, and the two can be tied via syndication. Is there too much duplication, though? And, once open to the public, will enough Sina users "get" this whole tweeting lark? If it survives the year, we'll have a clear idea of that.

To throw in my own 2 cents at the end, I think that while the "comment" is a nice way to gather all the replies to one message together, it is ultimately too Web 1.0, and lacks the right element of interactivity that is surely vital to a social-networking service. It sort of stops dead a conversation in a pile-up of answers.

If you'd like an invite to this site while still in beta, or to give your impressions, please hit the comments below.

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