Yesterday, Sina Tech sub-site Startup Stories posted an interesting op-ed from T.H. Capital CEO Hou Xiaotian entitled “Why is Sina’s Stock Undervalued on Wall Street?” In it, Hou argues that given that Alibaba valued Sina Weibo at $32.56/share for its big Weibo investment, when you add in the value of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) other services, the company’s stock ought to be up around $73, yet it continues to languish in the $50-$60 range instead.

Of course, some have argued that Alibaba gave Sina a pretty sweet deal in terms of Weibo’s valuation, but Hou asserts that the Alibaba number is actually quite reasonable, and lays out five reasons why this is the case:

1. “Weibo has a monopoly on the market.” Hou says that 85% percent of all time spent microblogging in China is spent on Sina Weibo, and it has more than 500 million registered users. Tencent Weibo has big numbers too, of course, but Hou says that it’s much less actively used.
2. “Weibo is a real-life platform.” Hou argues that beyond real-name registration, users actually build real “micro-lives” on Weibo complete with their own social circles, entertainment, news, and a lot of voluntary sharing about their real lives. It’s almost like an online journal in some ways.
3. “Weibo creates web 2.0 content.” To explain this, Hou compares Weibo search — where users can find the answers to questions (because the hottest posts on any given topic tend to be what most people are looking for) — to traditional search where users find “a pile of indexed links” that can be hard to sort through”. Weibo, Hou argues, produces a ton of content that sorts itself more or less automatically, and it’s always timely and based on what users want.
4. “Weibo is an entrance point for the mobile web.” Hou says Weibo’s daily traffic exceeds 1 billion pageviews per day, and that 75% of it comes via mobile clients.
5. “Weibo is a kind of self-run media.” Hou points out that Weibo has been exceedingly valuable as a way of spreading information and has arguably increased transparency in Chinese society, even if the information it spreads is sometimes of dubious veracity.

I’m not an investor, or an expert in how companies are valued, so I won’t dispute any of Hou’s specific numbers. But I do think that she’s viewing Weibo with a particularly rosy set of glasses — perhaps it’s not a coincidence this article was published on Sina Tech — and there do seem to be some legitimate reasons to think Alibaba’s Weibo valuation was a bit over the top.

To begin with, some of Hou’s numbers are pretty shocking. She doesn’t cite sources for any of them but I’m guessing most of them come from T.H. Capital’s own research, but even so a few jump out as questionable. For instance: Sina Weibo gets more daily traffic and pageviews than Baidu? That would be pretty surprising. And while yes, Weibo does have 500 million registered users, only a small fraction of them are active (a study published in March found that only 200 million or so users had ever posted, and only 30 million users wrote unique posts in a given week).

Hou’s point about Weibo’s search being more valuable than Baidu’s is interesting but, I think, misleading in some ways. Weibo search is extremely effective at helping users find certain kinds of information. If you want the latest trends, to see what people are saying about a particular actress, or to hear the latest about a political scandal, for example, Weibo search is probably better than Baidu. But at the same time, if you’re looking for biographical information about a historical figure, a link to a popular e-commerce site, or information about the lineup of an NBA team (for example), Baidu is going to be far more effective than Sina. At one point in her article, Hou asserts that Sina’s Weibo search should be valued at double what Baidu’s search is worth per capita because it is more effective, but that is only true for a specific sort of search. Personally, I do a fair amount of searching for my job, and while sometimes Weibo search is the right tool, most of the time my search begins and ends with Baidu.

Finally, I think Hou is understating the threat that Weibo faces from WeChat. Granted, WeChat doesn’t offer the quasi-journal-like features Weibo has, but frankly Weibo isn’t that great for journaling either. Both platforms are best at communicating the here and now, what’s happening within your circles of contacts, and while there are significant differences between the services, WeChat’s growth should still be pretty alarming to Sina — even CEO Charles Chao has said WeChat poses a threat — and it’s no surprise it’s also affecting Sina’s stock price. Users, after all, only have so much time in the day, and the more time they spend on WeChat, the less time they’re spending on Weibo.

There are other reasons to be bearish on Sina — Weibo faces regulatory threat constantly, Sina has had a really tough time monetizing it — but generally speaking, I do think Weibo is a very valuable service. Is it as valuable as the $32.56 per share that Aliababa paid for it? Right now, I’d argue it’s definitely not, but then again, Alibaba didn’t invest just to make a quick buck, and over the long term if it can help Sina make Weibo profitable, the service certainly could be worth that, and a great deal more.

(image via Sina Tech)

A couple weeks ago, Sina admitted its flagship product Weibo is threatened by WeChat. Then last week, I wrote about why the Weibo vs. WeChat battle is hugely important, and later in the week Han Han even chimed in. But the latest sign that this is the year of the Weibo-WeChat battle (and that Weibo might be losing) comes from TechWeb, which is reporting that Sina Weibo is conducting internal testing on a new WeChat-inspired “Public Platform” feature.

Like WeChat’s platform of the same name, the new Sina Weibo feature would allow users to send group messages, although right now it is apparently targeted only at large media outlets. The chief advantage of this platform, aside from the fact that it’s designed specifically for mobile, is that it would allow for the posting of messages longer than 140 characters. This means that news media, for example, could share full stories within the platform and their followers could read them directly within Sina’s app, without having to click a link and shift to a mobile browser. The same thing, of course, is also possible with WeChat.

Since Sina’s “Public Platform” is currently still in internal testing, it’s not clear what it will actually look like by the time it’s released — if it ever does get released. But one question raised by the folks over at TechWeb that’s worth pondering is whether media outlets will really be interested in engaging with a platform that doesn’t direct readers to their own websites. If users are reading full stories right in Sina’s app, that’s great for Sina, but it deprives those media outlets of website visitors, and thus advertising dollars. Aiming the Public Platform right at media outlets might make it a tough sell.

Whatever happens, it seems clear that both Weibo and WeChat are gearing up for a clash over users. While Sina tests a way to make its service more like WeChat, Tencent is rumored to be adding Tencent Weibo functionality into the WeChat app to make it a bit more like Sina Weibo. It’s not clear what either company will ultimately actually push out the door, but it’s quite clear that the space between Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat is going to be a battleground as two of China’s biggest internet companies fight over the hearts and minds of China’s social and mobile web users.

(via TechWeb)

As we explained way back in 2011, if someone wants to boost their popularity on Sina Weibo, they can buy new followers. But those will be zombies – soul-less Weibo accounts that post no original content, run by the shady individuals who take your money in exchange for these new ‘fans’. Now that Sina Weibo has surpassed 500 million registered users this week, we need to take a closer look at the active user numbers also revealed by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) a few days ago.

Sina, in its post-report earnings call, said that it has 46.3 million daily active users. That’s just under 10 percent of its registered user-base. Also, it admitted that over the course of a year, nine to 10 percent of users are active. There’s that number again. Surely it means that 90 percent of Weibo users are zombies.

Or perhaps, even worse than being zombies – in social media terms, not in the context of a horror movie – is that these users are dead and gone. They came, they saw, they posted a couple of times, and they left. At least zombies – or spammers, of which there are also many on Weibo – would be defined as “active” sometimes. But, the sad fact suggested by these new numbers is that Sina Weibo is kept alive by a very chatty and social core of 50 million users, and everyone else has vanished.

Anyone alive in here?

Indeed, of those 50 million left over, how many are actually real people? If it’s still true – as we wrote last year – that half of all retweets on Weibo are from spammers, then the actual genuine, honest-to-goodness human user-base on Weibo could be as low as 25 million, which is not much more than the population of Shanghai.

That’s speculation of course, but the 500 million figure seems to be an empty shell. The active numbers also make a mockery of Sina’s claims that its implementation of ‘real name’ registration, which was pushed by censorious authorities in March of last year, would help cut down on fake accounts. To be fair, we observed the activity on trending Weibo topics after the real name deadline and found that the real ID requirement did not impact user-ship of Weibo – but it also didn’t seem to solve the problem of zombie and spammer accounts

While Sina Weibo is a fun and full-featured social network – which started out as a Twitter clone but is now as expansive as Facebook – it must be worrying for Sina that so few on Weibo are that active over the course of a year. Things always fall out of fashion, so there’s a risk that Weibo might have reached its saturation point, and could soon fall out of favor despite the $280 million that the web company has invested into Weibo in the past two years – and without seeing much financial reward for all that monetization.

Sina also knows that it must monetize more and put more of its features onto mobile, which is surely the only way to bring in more genuine users to the service. While it doesn’t have any very similar competition that might usurp it – just as Twitter seems fairly solid in its place right now – the messaging app WeChat is fast becoming a rival, allowing its users to do things that they’d previously enjoyed on Weibo, such as sharing photos and following brands and celebrities.

So Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) announced its not-so-good Q4 financials today. While the Chinese web company has multiple businesses, all the scrutiny is on its microblog, Sina Weibo. Our friends at 36Kr have pointed to several more interesting statistics revealed by Sina. Definitely the biggest, as revealed in the earnings call, is that Sina Weibo has now surpassed 500 million – yes, half a billion – registered users in total. Sina Weibo passed the 400 million milestone just in time for its Q3 report.

Out of those 500 million, 46.3 million are daily active users. Impressively, 75 percent of its daily active users use Weibo through their mobile devices at some point in time. Over the course of a year, nine to 10 percent of users are active.

In terms of raw money, Sina has ploughed $280 million into Weibo, its flagship social product, which explains why its income is going down despite slowly rising revenues.

Monetizing not mobile enough

Looking at the statistics, it is fair to assume that most eyeballs and engagement comes from mobile. If Sina is looking to monetize its microblog service, the solution has to be a mobile one, not web. Unfortunately for Sina, its monetization channels, like social gaming and brand partnerships, work better in the full web browser, not it official or third-party apps.

But one thing that makes Weibo attractive is that messages can potentially turn uber viral and become a conversation among millions of users (rival messaging app WeChat really can’t do that, yet). Combining mobile (location, push notifications, etc) and its viral potential, it looks like a potential mobile commerce solution to me. One that could pull and push relevant m-commerce content to users based on location, allow them to create a conversation around it, and possibly buy things through Weibo itself.

We know Sina tested e-commerce with phone-maker Xiaomi and the test was a success. Though the non-mobile problem was seen even in this effort – the arrangement with Xiaomi was more of a “viral push” based around the desktop/full website, and hasn’t really taken advantage of mobile or mobile commerce.

There’s so much more to explore in m-commerce and I’m positive that Sina’s investment in Weibo will pay off if it makes some adjustments this year. The mobile is a device that sticks to the users wherever they go and I see Weibo (together with WeChat) staying for a long time. Banner ads stink, so a better solution is needed. Mobile commerce, and acting as a games platform – perhaps replicating the success of Line app in this area – are likely the foreseeable revenue engines for Sina Weibo. Sina’s income and share price took a slight dip yesterday on its Q4 data showing Weibo being so expensive to run without much to show for it. Apart from half a billion registered users. But it is investing heavily in the future of mobile and it’s in one of the best positions to do it really well.

Chinese web company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) wheeled out its Q4 and full-year 2012 financials last night, revealing slight growth in net revenues and advertising revenues – but no end to rising operating costs for the company and its popular Sina Weibo social platform. The company explained:

2012 was a year of investment for Sina. We are delighted that Weibo continued to gain popularity and Weibo monetization was off to a good start. In 2013, we will continue to improve user experience and expand the scale of Weibo monetization, while [we] turn our focus to mobile internet for all of our major product lines.

Sina chairman and CEO Charles Chao said during the earnings conference call, as spotted by TheNextWeb, that the company is not worried about the messaging app WeChat. Though WeChat and Weibo are different beasts, there are areas that clash, such as WeChat allowing users to follow brands and celebrities.

Charles Chao did admit that Sina Weibo – which has over 400 million registered users – had seen a dip in the amount of time that users were spending on the Twitter-like service. He called that reduction “inevitable”, and maintained that Weibo was more established than WeChat (which is called Weixin in Chinese), and generally mainstream enough to compete with the 300-million-user-strong messaging app.

Indeed, Sina seems comfortable enough with WeChat as a rival to Weibo that the Android version of the Sina Weibo app recently added a dedicated ‘share to WeChat‘ function.

Sina Q4 financials

Going back to the newly-revealed numbers, Sina posted net revenues of $529.3 million for full-year 2012, up 10 percent year-on-year. Advertising revenues were up seven percent for the quarter, and for the whole year amounted to $412.9 million, up 12 percent from 2011. But all that investment in growing Weibo, which is Sina’s most popular product, once again resulted in rising costs for the company as a whole – income fell sharply to $2.4 million in Q4, down from $9.3 million in Q4 2011.

Weibo monetizes mainly from advertising and brand partnerships, with some income also coming from its Facebook-like social gaming platform, which launched back in 2011.

$SINA fell in Tuesday trading after the numbers were revealed, dropping 4.5 percent to stand at $53.48 per share. Sina’s shares peaked at over $130 in April 2011.

Like most of China’s big tech investment gurus, Xu Xiaoping is on Sina Weibo. And although fellow tech investor Kaifu Lee just spent some quality time with China’s State Security officers for advocating more press freedom in China, Xu Xiaoping has apparently not been intimidated into silence, and recently posted this call for greater internet freedom to his weibo account:

As China opens the door to development, it needs to reduce [the degree to which] the internet is closed off. For example, the extremely valuable international movie database imdb.com; at the very least that ought to be unblocked. China wants to be a big cultural power, but it is castrating itself by keeping the most valuable treasure trove of cultural information [the internet, in the global sense] locked outside. How can we do this [and still] accomplish the goals of the 18th Party Congress? I suggest that the relevant departments actively modify internet site-blocking measures, and unblock those sites that can be unblocked immediately.

Xu’s point here is one that has been made by many before (including me, although I stole it from Han Han), and has continued to fall upon deaf ears. It also touches on one of China’s most bizarre site blockages, the longstanding and thoroughly inexplicable blocking of imdb.com. Xu’s words aren’t extreme enough that he’s likely to get a tea invitation, but it’s still good to see that tech celebrities like Xu still aren’t afraid to speak out after the state’s attempt to intimidate a number of high profile weibo users.

(Xu Xiaoping’s Weibo)

A few days ago, I wrote about a rant posted to Sina Weibo and spotted by Global Voices Online in which an alleged member of Sina’s censorship team explains the company’s censorship in part by saying that Sina doesn’t want to censor weibo posts, but it is required to do so in order to follow Chinese law.

That’s a refrain we hear from Chinese internet companies over and over again when it comes to censorship: ‘we don’t want to be doing this, but these are the rules of the game in China, and we have to play along.’ That is true, of course; any company that didn’t censor its user-generated content for the domestic market would be on the fast track to being shut down. But it is also a little bit of a lie. If these companies only censor because it is mandated by the Chinese government, why are their services still censored for users abroad?

Just a few hours ago we noticed that Tencent’s WeChat app was censoring “sensitive” words, even in some cases where both the sender and the receiver of the “sensitive” message were outside China. But Tencent is not an outlier. Weibo posts from overseas that contain sensitive words still get deleted, and politically sensitive searches are blocked for everyone, not just users in China. If I search for “Tiananmen” on Baidu from the US, I still get heavily censored responses. Every other Chinese web platform I’m aware of operates the same way; all content is censored according to Chinese law, even content that is being sent and received outside of China’s borders.

The obvious reason for this is that most of these companies have their servers within China’s borders, so content sent and recieved outside China still has to go through China along the way. When I post a message to weibo, for example, even though I am in the United States, that message has to be transmitted to Sina’s servers in China, which ostensibly have to be scrubbed in accordance with government policy. The same general principle can be applied to most other Chinese internet companies, too. So they really are trapped after all then, right?

Well, yes and no. Technically and legally, it should be possible for any Chinese company to set up servers and offices outside of China, from which it should be free to serve uncensored content to users without violating Chinese law, so long as those users were not in China. In fact, they could probably do it legally from Hong Kong (despite being technically a part of China, Hong Kong has different internet laws). And while that certainly would require some effort, many of the companies we’re talking about (especially Tencent and Baidu) already have extensive operations abroad, and virtually everybody has an office in Hong Kong.

If these companies were truly committed to freedom of speech, they could establish overseas servers and a technical process such that when I post to weibo, for example, the post might need to be hidden from domestic users but could still be displayed to Sina’s international user base. Yet none of them (that I’m aware of) actually offer this sort of service. The reason is not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it isn’t a priority.

(Granted, the vast majority of these companies’ user bases are within mainland China. But most of them also have millions of users collectively in Hong Kong and overseas in Taiwan and among the immigrants and students living in the West.)

I do not mean to suggest that Chinese internet companies are evil, or that they benefit much from censoring content. The reality is that they all know their users would be happier with uncensored content, but even in a space where Chinese laws do not technically apply, un-censoring “sensitive” things could potentially damage their relationship with the government. It seems all of these companies have made the calculation that the potential benefits gained from un-censoring overseas content do not yet outweigh the risks such a move would generate for the company’s domestic operations and continued relations with the government.

That is each company’s choice to make, and I do not condemn them for making it. To a certain extent, I buy the Sina censor’s argument that a censored weibo (for example) is still better than none at all. At the same time, though, I think the narrative of victimhood many of these companies present to the outside world — that they are forced by the government to censor user-generated content — is misleading. Any Chinese internet company could offer completely uncensored service outside China’s borders if it so chose. Most have them have simply decided that doing so would be bad for business.

That, of course, is a perfectly fair decision for a business to make. But I wonder at what point that decision is going to harm these companies’ aspirations of overseas growth. How much faster would Sina Weibo grow in Taiwan if it was uncensored? How big could WeChat be if it didn’t have the stigma of political censorship draped around its neck like a dead albatross? For most overseas users, censorship of China-related topics is going to be a little-noticed minor annoyance, but it is absolutely terrible for marketing and branding. That is doubly true if the companies are also not transparent about what is allowed and what isn’t, which is often the case on Chinese content platforms.

Just as global internet companies adjust their practices in accordance with Chinese laws and customs when they enter the country, Chinese internet companies need to embrace a freer global internet culture as they move increasingly outside their home country if they want to have any hope of competing with other global brands. Most users are not going to choose a censored platform over an uncensored one voluntarily, so if Chinese internet companies really want to make waves abroad, they’ll have to do more than just complain about their legal obligation to censor. The level of transparency and free exchange many users demand may be illegal in China, but the barriers stopping Chinese companies from implementing a freer exchange for overseas users — both existing users and ones that they hope to attract in the future — are financial and (corporate) cultural, not legal barriers.

photo: autoblog.com

While we’re not attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we are paying close attention to news coming out of the annual tech event. Among all the headlines, American car-maker Ford (NYSE:F) made a play to bring more mobile applications to its Sync voice-activated system, and surprisingly China’s most popular microblog, Sina Weibo, is one of nine new apps to be added.

According to the announcement, Ford’s collaboration with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) makes the Weibo mobile app available in the vehicle via the AppLink API, allowing drivers to access news, weather, microblogging, and location-based services using voice control.

Drivers can connect their phone to the Sync system, and use apps which Ford supports. But the car-maker says it doesn’t allow certain kinds of apps that would be a visual distraction, such as any video or rich imagery apps, games, or any application that requires extensive reading.

Other new apps to join Ford’s AppLink ecosystem are The Wall Street Journal, Amazon Cloud Player, Rhapsody, Glympse, and Aha Radio.

The timing for Ford to offer support for Chinese services with AppLink couldn’t be better, as a new ban on using cell phones while driving just went into effect on New Year’s Day ¹, and we subsequently saw numerous reports of consumers buying up hands-free Bluetooth headsets as a result. It will be interesting to see if Ford can benefit from the new law in a similar way.

(Via LiveScience.com)

The wonderful folks over at Global Voices Online have made a fascinating discovery on weibo: a long weibo post from a user who claims to be an employee in Sina Weibo’s censorship division. It is difficult to confirm whether or not the poster really is who they say they are, but for whatever it’s worth, the message of the post is quite similar to what we often hear behind closed doors from employees at Chinese web companies that are forced to censor user content. Even if it isn’t genuine, I think some parts of it are very worth reading. (The quotations that follow are mostly Global Voices’ translation, but I have made a few minor adjustments where appropriate).

The poster — responding to the growing outcry surrounding the Southern Weekend incident — makes several points in defense of weibo’s censorship. The first is quite simple: “If we didn’t delete your posts, that might mean we had to stop you from posting altogether.” Deleting posts, the writer argues, is still better than deleting accounts, and things may not entirely be in Sina’s hands anyway:

Since the day when Weibo’s comments function was suspended for three days, a special group of people have the authority to decide on the criteria for giving out alert signals, and can make Weibo go “game-over” as simply as treading on some ants without giving a damn about people’s needs.

The people need Weibo to project our voices, but when the hand behind weibo wants to manipulate the discussion, something has to be sacrificed. We live in a country full of special and sensitive barriers and we have to operate within a set of rules.

The poster’s second point is that censorship isn’t actually in Sina’s interest, and that the company has as little choice in the matter as regular net users. This is something we hear time and time again from Chinese internet companies, but then the author makes a rather shocking implication that Sina Weibo may be intentionally delaying censorship of messages to allow them to spread for a little while:

You can see the messages before they are deleted, right? You still have your account functioning, right? You are all experienced netizens, you know that the technology allows us to delete messages in a second. Please think carefully on this.

The author’s last major point follows in this vein, further suggesting that Sina has been actively trying to spread political messages like the news of the Southern Weekend incident before they are deleted:

Before this incident occurred, and at its very early stages, we were under a lot of pressure. We tried to resist and let the messages spread and won a difficult victory. Our official account @Sina_Media reported on the suspension of the Southern Weekend instantly, and the news was retweeted by @headline_news, which was again retweeted again 30,000 times in 10 mins. Then we got the order from the Propaganda Department and we had to delete it. Fortunately, the message had already been distributed. A friend from a Penguin website left a warm message in my microblog: This is a battle. Sina is a human flesh shield. It is a courageous act.

To be quite frank, I think the idea that Sina is selflessly acting as the voice of the people is a bit naive. We know that Sina does push the envelope in terms of censorship every now and then, but this is likely less about self-sacrifice for the greater good and more about maintaining its user base and its reputation as the most open and active platform for discussion on the Chinese web (without which it would start losing users rather quickly, I suspect). Of course, it’s debatable whether Sina’s intentions really matter if the effect is the same regardless, but it’s still worth pointing out that the writer’s rosy portrait of Sina here may be a bit biased.

The message concludes with the author saying that his bosses at Sina will be “invited to tea” again, a euphemism that refers to being interrogated by the police or other state authorities.

While I have some doubts about the poster’s identity, there’s little doubt that much of what he or she wrote is true. Censorship really only hurts Sina by reducing their users numbers and annoying users, and it has been clear for quite some time that Sina sometimes tries to follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of it, erring in favor of more user freedom. But from the post quoted above, it also sounds like propaganda authorities are exercising an unprecedented level of control over the service. It’s impossible to be sure whether that’s true, but given the unprecedented controls being implemented for other parts of China’s internet, it certainly isn’t implausible.

Still, this kind of directness about the system is very rare, and if the author really does work for Sina, he may already be looking for a new job.

[via Global Voices Online]

China’s tightened internet controls were passed into law earlier today. As well as requiring broadband and mobile internet providers to have full ‘real name’ details of their customers (which pretty much happens already), the new 12-article law also mandates how all web companies operating in China must control what people post. That effectively legalizes the deletion of posts that contain what authorities deem to be “illegal” content or information.

Again, that’s close to what happens already in practice with the blanket self-censorship and fast-paced moderation that goes on on the Chinese web, as seen very clearly on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo. And so the new law will criminalize companies who do not censor the web with the kind of speed and efficiency that the law now dictates. That has huge implications for social companies like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Tencent (HKG:0700), and Renren (NYSE:RENN), and search engines from Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU). In fact, it’s an extra strain on the whole internet sector in the country, with possible extra costs involved in the already weighty and arduous practice of removing dissent, as well as other genuinely illegal acts on the web.

It’s surely only a matter of time before one Chinese web company is held criminally responsible for content posted on its service. And what will happen then? A fine? The jailing of the relevant member of staff?

Using Xinhua’s presumably official version of events, the news agency summarizes this aspect of the new law:

Service providers are required to instantly stop the transmission of illegal information once it is spotted and take relevant measures, including removing the information and saving records, before reporting to supervisory authorities, the decision says.

It empowers supervising departments to take technical and other necessary measures to prevent, stop or punish those who infringe on online privacy, requiring relevant service providers to give support during investigations.

There are some positive aspects to all this, as it also puts into law measures that, Xinhua says, “will protect digital information that could be used to determine the identity of a user or that concerns a user’s privacy.”

But as with all new web controls in China, a country where the web is already massively locked down, many will worry that the tightened legal framework will be used to identify people who post online some ‘sensitive’ information, such as – to take a topical example – evidence of corruption among officials.

In practice, a lot of this is happening already, as with recent real name requirements for microblogs like Sina Weibo, or the long-standing need to show ID when buying a mobile SIM. For now, a lot of questions remain unanswered, such as how this affects wifi hotspots, or people who rent homes and whose broadband account will be in the name of the home-owner – and a lot of other issues and unknowns.

The major Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), maker of the hugely popular Sina Weibo, is keen to avoid the stasis of Yahoo. And so this morning, Sina’s CEO Charles Chao sent out an internal email outlining the company’s new “mobile first” strategy that’ll come with a major corporate restructuring.

In the email, seen by 36Kr (via TheNextWeb), Chao reviews the outgoing year and looks ahead to what it needs to do in 2013. He calls the monetization of Sina Weibo – with things like social commerce, social gaming, and its recently rebranded e-payments service – “a good start” without explicitly saying that Weibo is making very little money from its 400+ million registered users.

Going mobile is at the heart of the forthcoming restructuring and monetizing, as Chao writes [in our translation]:

In the upcoming 2013, the core of the company’s strategy will be “mobile first,” and at the same time we need to focus on the core business and enhance the company’s overall efficiency.

“Mobile first” demands the company, from top to bottom, consciously embrace mobile, and requires the ability to enhance the understanding of mobile, and shift to mobile resources. […] We need to break the organizational structure that binds PC and mobile businesses.

And so each of Sina’s main products will be split into a mobile and non-mobile arm, it appears from Chao’s email. The most crucial of these – the Weibo division – will be run by company VP Wang Gaofei as Weibo general manager, alongside Chu Dachen in charge of Weibo’s open platform and business development. Sina’s music business will also be jammed into the Sina Weibo department.

Chao acknowledges towards the end of the email that it has been years since Sina last restructured. He calls the mobile internet “an opportunity and a challenge for Sina.” It’s one that all major web companies are facing, especially now that some markets are seeing more users online via smartphones than laptops and PCs. There’s no mention, however, of ongoing rumors that China’s top e-commerce company, Alibaba, is trying to make a sizeable investment in the Sina Weibo division.

Chasing the mobile money

Sina runs China’s fourth-largest web portal business by revenue, though it’s proportionally too reliant on ad income which can be particularly fickle and prone to cut-backs during times of economic stress. Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s biggest web company, is way ahead of the pack in terms of monetizing mobile, with 9.5 percent of its Q1 2012 revenue coming from mobile value-added services. Here’s the corresponding graph:

Sina is also up against a growing social challenge from Tencent in the form of the latter’s WeChat app (known in China as Weixin). Though WeChat is primarily a messaging app like Whatsapp or Line, it also has broader social elements that threaten Sina Weibo, such as WeChat’s Path-like ‘Moments’ feature, and a growing brand platform that might soon expand into localized deals and payments. WeChat is expected to hit 300 million registered users next month.

[Source: 36Kr; via TNW]

It has been a doubleplusgood year for Sina Weibo in terms of doubling its registered user count to 400 million. But, as China’s hottest Twiitery, real-time social medium, Weibo has once again been a political hot potato for Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) – and it’s still not turning a profit.

Just as with all media in China, Sina Weibo is heavily censored; but doing this in real-time, under the weight of hundreds of millions of users, and in a year of tumult, corruption and a leadership changeover, looked to be a huge challenge for the web portal company. In 2012, Weibo has seen some astonishing new censorship ploys, and, at one point of the year, every single Weibo user was very publicly punished by authorities. Looking back on it, it was all pretty insane.

Here are 10 stand-out cases, in chronological order, of Weibo – at the behest of authorities – gagging its users:

1. Weibo blocks searches for police chief’s defection [February] -

Sometimes, the seriousness of a news story is unintentionally revealed by the severity of the Weibo cover-up that it merits. In February of this year, that’s exactly what happened as the biggest scandal of the year – perhaps the biggest political scandal in China for decades – began to unfold with the defection of a top police chief to the US embassy in Chengdu. Eventually this story was made known to the Chinese public via state TV (and it led to the downfall of top politician Bo Xialai), but for a while it was only via Sina Weibo and some other social media that the news was flowing.

2. Coup rumors lead to ban on Weibo comments [March] -

And it’s precisely because state TV is so economical – and/or slow – with the truth that Sina Weibo is often full of rumors. That went to an extreme in March when Chinese web users got themselves into a frenzy over some photos of several military vehicles on the streets of Beijing. Those images somehow frothed up into coup rumors. That prompted an amazing and massive slam-down by authorities, who ordered Sina to ban all comments for four days while those rumors were cleaned up.

Those who spread rumors were called “lawbreakers” by Xinhua, the official state wire service. It was interesting that this happened despite recently implemented real-name registration requirements for users on Sina Weibo and all other Twitter-like social media – a move that was designed to clamp down on rumors and other online behavior that authorities deem to be unhealthy.

3. Escaped dissident puts Weibo on the run [May] -

After all that excitement, we had only to wait a few weeks before another astonishing story emerged that really put Sina’s censors on red alert. In this case, we observed that Weibo was not blocking posts being created that contained the newest-of-very-many ‘sensitive’ terms, but was instead not indexing them in Weibo’s own search engine (at s.weibo.com) so as to make it seem like less of a popular topic.

4. An old anniversary sees Weibo censorship jump the shark [May] -

By the time we reached May, Sina Weibo was so over-sensitive that it just seemed to have folded in on itself and then got sucked up its own ass.

5. Forget ‘terms and conditions’ – here’s what Weibo doesn’t want you to do [May] -

Soon, Sina had drawn up a ‘user contract’ that outlined what users could discuss on the social platform. It included points such as a ban on “calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings, and assemblies.”

6. Loose lips sink Weibo users [May] -

To back up that user contract, Sina came up with a points-based system so as to encourage users to be good stewards of the web and not post rumors, or repost or comment upon harassing or dubious posts. While it might stop harmful or unsavory content from spreading, it was also a means to stop the spread of ‘sensitive’ news.

7. Weibo censors whole of Hong Kong as protests hit the streets [July] -

As we reached summer, the kind of thing that authorities don’t want being spread on Weibo was being spread on Weibo. And so all users based in Hong Kong were temporarily wiped off the map.

8. Truth no longer exists [July] -

A short while later, the Chinese internet began imitating The Onion as searches for the word “truth” were banned on Weibo.

9. ‘Free Weibo’ search unleashes the tweets that are too hot to handle [October] -

After such an infuriating year of Weibo obstruction, we were delighted to find FreeWeibo, which allows you to search for search terms that are blocked on the Sina Weibo site. It was clear all year that Weibo’s own search tool was more of a hindrance than a help – and that only got worse during the year…

10. Sina Weibo now delaying mentions of ‘sensitive’ words by 7 days [December] -

Confirming that Sina’s own social search engine is now largely useless, the web company began a surprising new tactic. Welcome to purgatory.

So that was an eventful year for “China’s Twitter.” But Weibo has so many features that it has become China’s Facebook as well. But despite all its many features – from brand pages to social gaming – Weibo is still defined by the power it has to amplify the voices of its Chinese users. That’s just the kind of voice that authorities would rather not have reverberating around the web, and so Weibo will be just as popular and problematic – and gagged – in 2013 as it was this year.

Users of Sina Weibo that mention things somewhat more controversial than cats or food might find their posts being delayed – by seven whole days. The Twitter-like Sina Weibo is supposed to be a real-time social platform, but that no longer applies to posts that mention ‘sensitive’ terms such as the names of China’s top leaders.

The huge delay was spotted by the FeiChangDao blog, which reckons that this Weibo purgatory came into effect earlier this month. At the time it was thought that Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) hugely popular social network – which now has over 400 million registered users – was relaxing its censorship after the recent leadership changeover. But now it appears that apparently sensitive terms are being monitored and then delayed, with users not informed that this is happening.

We’ve verified that the Weibo delay is real. Searching for the name of China’s upcoming new leader, Xi Jinping, on Sina Weibo’s own social search engine returns a mere three results from today and yesterday (try it here), all of which have been tagged as “hot Weibo topics” as if sanctioned by Sina itself. But then there’s a gap of precisely seven days – back to December 14th – before a flood of Weibo posts from regular users that mention the nation’s new leader. The Weibo search engine doesn’t give the usual warning that results have been removed due to relevant laws, which is the usual schtick that’s shown. Check this out:

This might be the new normal for Weibo, with political and other sensitive issues being forced into this bizarre time-warp. Of course, very controversial topics in China are still fully blocked on Weibo, as they are in all other media.

Sina investors might be concerned about how much extra pressure this self-censorship is putting on the web portal company. We’ve already looked at the eight key ways that Sina Weibo censors its users, and now it seems to have a new tactic with this political posting purgatory.

[Source: FeiChangDao]

Friends and online contacts are a great source of app recommendations. And Sina Weibo, China’s top Twittery service, seems to agree. In the newly updated Sina Weibo for Android (v.3.2.0 beta 1), the social network adds cards to your stream (pictured above) whenever someone you follow installs an app from Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) own third-party app store [1].

It’s all pretty useful. Though an unwary individual might find himself or herself – well, more likely ‘himself’ – downloading an app of a saucy nature, such as Japanese Beauties Bouncy Boobies Live Wallpaper [2], from Sina’s Android app market, and then seeing it broadcast to all your followers.

In addition to that, the newest Sina Weibo for Android app shows a similar app card, replete with the app’s icon, whenever someone links to an Android application on an array of third-party download sites. It’s a bit like the preview that Google+ implemented recently whenever someone links to an app on Google Play – except that the system is a lot more inclusive on Weibo. If you fancy installing this app yourself, then the link in the Sina Weibo for Android app takes you to a landing page from which you can install that app directly to your phone – all from within the social app. It looks like this:

Just yesterday we looked at how the latest Sina Weibo app update was also bringing tentative support for Sina’s own e-payments service, including on the iPhone version.

You can get Sina Weibo for Android from pretty much any third-party app store, but it seems apt to snag it from Sina’s own App Center, here.

[Images: Techweb]

When Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), makers of the Twitter-like Weibo, launched its social gaming platform and virtual currency in July of 2011, it already had an online payments service in place so that it wasn’t reliant on e-payment services created by its Chinese web rivals. That was called SinaPay, which is a lot like PayPal. But it looks set to get a major rebranding very soon, giving it the more socially-oriented name WeiboPay.

Whatever the thing is called, WeiboPay still has a lot of local competitors, with more established e-payments systems already in place from the likes of Alibaba (with Alipay) and Tencent (TenPay).

WeiboPay will soon get a new homepage at Weibopay.com, but for now that redirects to the older branded site at the not-so-catchy pay.sina.com.cn. But the remit of the online payment service remains the same, in that it can be used to pay for things like Weibi (Sina Weibo’s own virtual currency) which is used for in-game purchases in many of its social games. Plus it’s used to pay the developers who publish on the Weibo gaming platform.

One expansion in WeiboPay comes with its inclusion in the newly updated official Sina Weibo app – though for now its mobile usability is quite limited. But with rival Tencent looking to be taking its smash-hit messaging app WeChat into the territory of local deals and social payments, Sina can’t afford not to develop WeiboPay into a more broadly useful service on smartphones.

Though Sina Weibo now has over 400 million registered users, it’s proving hard to monetize, and Sina on the whole is over-reliant on revenues from advertising – a flakey business – on its web portal properties.

[Source: Sohu IT (article in Chinese); via Marbridge Daily]

From a regular user perspective, the interface is really intuitive. Large buttons at the top of the homepage make it easy to do what you want to, whether that’s donating money, donating specific items, volunteering to help an organization, participating in charity auctions, or just re-tweeting messages from NGOs and other nonprofits in the hopes that it brings them more attention and donors. There are lots of organizations already signed up, so whether you want to help out poor children, feed tigers, or rescue cute puppies, there’s probably something on Gongyi for you. And it’s nice that the site gives users lots of options beyond just donating money. I’m not sure how valuable retweeting messages really is, but it’s better than nothing, and allowing users to volunteer their time to some organizations is also an excellent option.

The site also encourages generosity with a sort of leaderboard of giving. Angel investor Xue Manzi (also known as Charles Xue; you may remember him from our GMIC coverage) currently holds the number two spot right now, and while it might seem impossible to out-charity a generous millionaire, remember that Gongyi gives points for more than just donating cash.

From an NGO perspective things are also pretty smooth. The signup process is relatively simple, although at present only verified users (with the V next to their name) can sign up. Although I’m not generally a fan of that kind of restriction, it makes perfect sense here as it allows Sina to verify that organizations are who they say they are, and ensures that users aren’t being asked to donate their money to scams. For those legit NGOs that do get signed up, Sina has the same options users get — everything from financial donations to charity auctions — so that nonprofits can choose the kind of campaign that’s right for them.

All in all, I’m very impressed with the new Gongyi weibo platform. This is the sort of thing that I wish Sina would push harder. Enterprise weibo may bring in the big bucks, but it’s platforms like this that can really show people what weibo brings to the table that can benefit society.

Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has released its third quarter financials and revealed that its top social hit, the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo, has now surpassed 400 million registered users. Chairman and CEO Charles Chao credited the summer’s biggest sporting event for the boost: “The London 2012 Olympic Games could very well be termed in China as the ‘social’ Olympics, pushing Weibo.com’s daily active users to a new record.” Last quarter, Sina did say that Weibo had 36.5 million average daily active users, but this time there were no specifics on this.

Aside from that bit of excitement, it’s still clear that Weibo is not helping Sina bring in much in the way of profit. On net revenues for this quarter of $152.4 million, Sina saw net income of $9.9 million. On the plus side, non-GAAP net revenues of $147.7 million (up 18 percent on same time last year) were at the top end of analysts’ expectations.

But Sina predicts lower non-GAAP net revenues for Q4 of “between $132 million and $136 million.” On the markets on Thursday, $SINA fell sharply in the morning after seeing these financials, before recovering to be up slightly in the day’s trading. It now stands at $53.10 per share.

I really wonder how much censorship costs Sina, and how they manage to bury it in their financial reports. As China’s top social media service, it’s under huge pressure from authorities to implement all the same monitoring and censorship as any media company – but Sina must do it in real-time with tens of millions (or sometimes hundreds of millions) of daily active users.

Sina Weibo topped 300 million users in May of this year, and surpassed 200 million back in August of 2011.

Chinese web companies have a bad reputation for back-stabbing and skullduggery – but that might be about to change, at least for China’s search engines. The country’s top 12 search engines [1] yesterday signed a code of conduct that aims to stamp out acts of sabotage and unfair competition.

The agreement brought together representatives from 12 web companies in the search engine sector at the behest of a government-backed trade organization. Aside from creating the awkward photo below, it also brought together fierce rivals Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Qihoo (NYSE:QIHU), which have been locked in a tense stand-off after Qihoo launched its own search engine this summer. Indeed, the subsequent Baidu-Qihoo tussle shone a spotlight on some of the shadier shenanigans on the Chinese web, with suspicions of content-scraping and blocking rivals.

Click to enlarge.

The code of conduct focuses on the web spiders that crawl websites to index content. These things should no longer be used “to carry out acts of unfair competition,” says the WSJ translation of the agreement. And although the code is voluntary and not legally binding, the government involvement might make the companies – such as Baidu, Qihoo, Tencent, and Sohu – wary of upsetting authorities.

Web spider usage was a cause of concern just after Qihoo’s 360 Search was launched, with some accusing Qihoo of scraping Baidu’s search results to give its fledgling product a boost. But yesterday, Qihoo’s CFO, Alex Xu, denied the allegation and said his company only indexed Baidu content like its Wikipedia-esque ZhiDao BaiKe service, and did not in any way steal Baidu’s search results.

As with all government-backed pronouncements like this, we say, Good luck with that!

[Source: WSJ (paywalled); photo: QQ Tech]

The site comes from the same folks behind Greatfire.org, and I spoke with a rep who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government reprisals. He told me the impetus for creating the site was pretty simple:

I generally want to make a contribution to combating censorship in China. I think the centralized control of information is scary. There are so many reasons and I’m sure I personally only know some of them. Very generally, the more freedom of speech, the better.

Perhaps needless to say, the site is blocked in China, but my contact said that it was just an IP block that should be remedied fairly soon. I can’t imagine it will last too long before it’s met with a domain block, though, especially given that the site’s interface (which is now only in English) will also be translated into Chinese.

I was also curious as to how the cooperation with WeiboScope (which is a project we looked at last year, run by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong) came about. I was told:

They [JMSC] agreed that I could use their data; that’s about it. They have limited resources and the search on their UI has been disabled which is a shame cause they have great data. I just wanted to make it more accessible.

Update 10/13: A former JMSC staffer emailed Tech in Asia to clarify that WeiboScope’s data is available to all without prior authorization and Free Weibo does not have any exclusive agreement or formal cooperation with JMSC.

Free Weibo is indeed very accessible, featuring a UI so simple that anyone could figure out in less than a second. It will be an extremely useful tool for journalists, but it should also be helpful for regular folks looking to make mundane searches that are blocked on Sina Weibo because of their association with “sensitive” topics. Regardless of your motives. Free Weibo should be a useful tool for taking a peek at the bits of Sina Weibo Sina and the government don’t want you to see.

I wish all tech companies had animals for logos - like Tencent's QQ penguin - as it makes it easier to do silly photoshops like this one.

A Chinese research institute, in cooperation with authorities in Beijing, has compiled a list of China’s top 100 tech and web companies by revenue. Looking only at the top 10, it’s full of familiar names from the world of social media, e-commerce, and gaming.

Before seeing the top 10 list, the institute’s white paper points out this eye-watering figure: China’s hundred hottest tech companies pulled in a total profit of 11.6 billion RMB – that’s US$1.868 billion – in 2011. That’s 26 percent higher than the industry average in the country.

1. Tencent (HKG:0700) makes China’s biggest social network and is also top in social gaming. Plus, it makes WeChat, the world’s biggest messaging app. Oh, and it does e-commerce. And lots more.
2. Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) must’ve had a good year to make it so high up the list – but then this list is about revenues, not a company’s market cap. Netease is primarily a web portal, but it also does online gaming (it runs World of Warcraft in the country), and also the Evernote-esque, Youdao Yunbiji service.
3. Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is the nation’s top search engine by a big margin, and also has a major ad platform and some social services too.
4. Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU) is another web portal, and is pushing its streaming video site pretty hard these days. It also runs the Sogou search engine which is sneaking up on Google’s market share.
5. Shanda (NASDAQ:SNDA; FRA:RZP) here means Shanda Interactive, which makes the Kindle-like Bambook e-reader, and has lots of web services like an e-bookstore, cloud storage, and more. Its gaming subsidiary is separate.
6. Alibaba is China’s biggest e-commerce company in every sector, running Tmall, Taobao, and Alibaba.com.
7. Perfect World (NASDAQ:PWRD) is China’s fourth-biggest social gaming platform.
8. Giant Interactive (NYSE:GA) is a tad smaller than perfect World in terms of gaming revenue, coming in sixth in that respect in the country. It runs games like Allods Online in the country.
9. Besttone (SHA:600640) is a telecoms firm, and the only one in the top 10 that we’ve never looked at before.
10. Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is talked about a lot these days – and on this site – as it runs Sina Weibo, China’s hippest Twitter-like service. But Weibo is proving costly to run and hard to monetize – hence having China’s hottest social media site doesn’t equate to stellar revenue.

There are plenty more big names lower down on the list, such as Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) in eleventh, media outlet People’s Daily Online (SHA:603000) in 24th, and the kids social network Taomee (NYSE:TAOM) in 41st.

Of course, the list is open to debate because revenue is not always the best way to rate a company. Perhaps a more representative list could be formed by calculating every firm’s true valuation. If we did that, then Tencent would still be first, but Alibaba Group would be second as the recent Yahoo share buyback and fundraising effectively valued Alibaba at $40 billion.

[Source: Techweb; via Techinasia Chinese]

Sina Weibo’s advertising department has just announced on Weibo that it is currently testing a new ad product, called “Fans Headlines.”

Fans Headlines ensures that the promoted message will be shown at the top portion of the Twitter-like Weibo stream to all of the advertiser’s fans. The promoted message will only be shown once within 24 hours – a relief to folks who hate ads. Once the promoted message is seen, it will move down the stream just like any other Weibo message.

Companies using the Fans Headlines ad product will be charged on a cost-per-fan impressions basis. Currently, there are already some companies using the new product as beta testers. I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last ad product introduced by Sina Weibo, which last week silently dropped the beta tag from its logo, probably signalling that its product and users have matured – and the social network is now ready to go full throttle on monetization.

[Via friends at Techweb]

Look, Ma, no beta!

Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-like service, has today removed the beta label from its site. The move comes one day after Weibo’s third anniversary, and ahead of a good-looking revamp of the site, dubbed Weibo v5, that’ll see it add circles (like G+) and timeline covers (like Facebook).

We’ve reached out to Sina and will update if we get back an explanation.

A bit like Gmail retaining its beta label for years, well past its maturing as a popular service, Sina Weibo has long since outgrown its kindergarten days. The Sina-run (NASDAQ:SINA) service has zoomed past 300+ million registered users, added social gaming and a virtual currency, and so many other features that it makes it seem like Twitter’s founders have been in comas for the past three years [1].

It’s only in terms of monetization that Sina Weibo is still making precarious baby steps. It’s proving costly to run and a huge burden to maintain real-time self-censorship at the behest of micro-censorious authorities. We suspect that the beta peel off is a preparation step towards its upcoming new design and also monetization methods.

The service was conceived at a meeting in May of 2009 in Chengdu, inspired by the rapid growth of Twitter and the desire to channel Sina’s large userbase into an interactive product. Although Sina’s executives likely wouldn’t admit it, the site was also inspired by Fanfou and other Chinese microblogs, which had been launched years earlier and were still in operation at the time Sina’s executives convened the Weibo meeting. A month later, though, those independent microblogs would all be shut down as the result of government censorship. Twitter and other overseas microblogging services were blocked. China was suddenly without a single microblogging service, and Sina could step unimpeded into the newly-created void.

Sina’s growth was immediate; no surprise given that there were many microblog addicts in China who hadn’t been able to get their fix since June. Within 66 days of the service’s August launch, it had broken a million users. Within eight months, ten million; within 14 months, 50 million. By the end of 2010, the site had broken the 100 million user barrier it took Tencent’s QQ three years to reach. Today, the count sits at more than 368 million, although only about 36.5 million of those are daily active users, according to Sina’s latest SEC filings. Needless to day, Sina’s stock price soared along with its user count.

Of course, along its journey, Sina Weibo has also had a tremendous effect on Chinese society. The sheer speed at which information travels — combined with the amplification effect that occurs when millions of users are angry all at once — has put Weibo in the middle of a number of recent important incidents from last year’s high speed rail crash to the infamous “My dad is Li Gang!” incident. As Kaifu Li put it, “Weibo has changed everything.”

Despite these accomplishments, weibo has struggled to define itself. Techweb’s Zhang Rui writes “the value of a social media service is information; the value of a social network is user relationships.” Weibo is obviously a powerful tool for spreading information, but that can be difficult to monetize effectively. And in a country where information often has to be tightly controlled, its value is diminished. As its userbase grows, Sina is forced to employ an increasingly large army of censors who patrol its pages for illegal information.

Sina Weibo does fill the role of a social network for some, but it hasn’t yet managed to replace Renren or China’s other more ‘traditional’ social networks. Weibo’s upcoming new design looks to take another step in Renren’s direction by allowing people to share to specific social circles, much like Google Plus’s Circles feature. Whether this will really increase user interactivity and make the service more of a place to chat with friends and less of a broadcast platform has yet to be seen. But the transition from a social media platform to a social networking platform isn’t likely to be an easy one.

But Weibo’s biggest problem is the same as it has always been: whence come the profits? It seems like a service with so many users ought to be rolling in dough, but Sina has struggled to monetize Weibo both directly and indirectly through a march of products (like Weibo Games) that have universally underwhelmed. Weibo has become a platform for all kinds of things (games, search, chat, Pinterest clones, groups, etc.), but none of them seem to be able to make Sina much money.

Internet analyst Wei Wuhui put it thusly:

[Sina] trying everything isn’t because it plans to transform Weibo into a platform, it’s what one does when searching in all directions trying to figure out where the profits are.

Internet expert Wang Yuquan agrees:

Sina Weibo’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t understand tech products well enough. Sina still hasn’t been successful in taking 400 million users and turning that into something that actually has value.

In its most recent quarter, Sina Weibo brought in about $10 million from advertising. Despite the service’s vast user base, this accounts for only ten percent of Sina’s overall ad revenue. That’s not too bad, but given the massive amount of money Sina and investors have put into the microblogging service, it’s not the sort of return anyone wants to see.

Sina CEO Charles Chao says the company still needs time, and ad sales will pick up as the market is educated about the value of Weibo advertising. But three years is already a lot of time, and Sina’s flailing platform projects certainly seem to indicate that the company is looking elsewhere for money and doesn’t expect to be making big profits off of ads sales, at least in the short term.

Where will Weibo be in another three years? Only time will tell. It’s potential as an engine for social upheaval puts it in a tenuous political position from time to time, but if Sina can’t crack the monetization problem once and for all, that is likely a greater threat to the service than any potential political problems. Weibo is huge, and Sina can afford to burn money for a while. But no company can carry a losing product forever.

[via TechWeb]

We’re told that this beta version of Sina Weibo is pretty buggy right now, and that’s seen in some layout quirks, such as the with the three numbers misaligned beneath the profile picture. The timeline cover will be customizable, just like Facebook’s. [UPDATED: It looks fine only when widescreen, so we've been kindly provided with a fresh screenshot]. Click to enlarge:

The forthcoming Weibo v5 will look best, we reckon, in its regular stream view, where all but the active icon on the left sidebar is greyed out (excluding the list of synced apps that’s lower down). This is where the revamped Sina Weibo will also see the Google+ style sharing of posts with only certain groups – or circles – of friends, which is also a new feature. There’s some buggy UI in this beta page too; that blank white area is very likely reserved for a banner advert. Click to enlarge again:

My personal Weibo page (@sirsteven) is, sadly, not on this closed beta, so we’ll all have to wait for it to go public as an option to eager Weibo geeks. Stay tuned!

As you can see from the image above, the file, called “download,” carries no file extension and begins downloading even though the browser appears to have redirected to a login URL. When asked on Twitter, security firm F-Secure said it wasn’t sure what was wrong with the site, but that it appeared to be safe to visit.

@chinageeks Sorry. No idea. Here’s what our Browsing Protection shows: browsingprotection.f-secure.com/swp/result?x=b…

— F-Secure (@FSecure) August 21, 2012

We are working to get in touch with several folks who work in internet security for comment and will update this post when we know more, but for the moment we’d recommend not visiting the site or opening the file until it’s fully clear what is happening. We have also gotten in touch with Sina to request a comment or an explanation of what’s going on here, and will update this post if we hear back. Until then, it looks like many of Sina Weibo’s international users will have to stick to their mobile apps (those seem to work fine) or wait until whatever this problem is gets fixed.

First up, looking at one’s Weibo profile page, it clearly resembles Facebook’s Timeline cover, with the individual’s avatar partially embedded in a picturesque banner. That’ll create plenty of scope for amusing Weibo cover photos in the future, just as we’ve seen happen with Facebook:

But for the view that most people are looking at all the time, their Weibo stream, the v5 redesign is less radical. Here we see a welcome bit of toning things down – quite literally – as inactive icons in the left sidebar become greyed-out:

A major new feature will be allowing Weibo posts to go out only to a certain circle of friends – just like with Google+ posts and Facebook wall messages. The current version of Sina Weibo does have rudimentary support for grouping – or circling – your followers together, and clearly that’ll be more useful once this new version launches.

There’s no word yet on a redesign for Sina’s bland Weibo mobile app. The website’s redesign will go into closed beta testing this week, Techweb adds, and will hopefully become an opt-in public beta before it gets rolled out later this year.

Chinese websites have a tendency to get overbloated very quickly, so we’ll have to wait and see if new features like the circled posts get used well, or just become another part of the clutter and confusion.

Sina Weibo currently has over 320 million registered users, but has proved to be a huge challenge to monetize. To help with this, Sina recently rolled out Twitter-esque ads in the form of promoted posts.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

Sina CEO Charles Chao

Chinese internet company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just released its second-quarter financial report, with net revenues up 11 percent to 131.6 million. The company’s advertising revenues are up 12 percent over the previous year, despite a difficult advertising market in China.

Sina’s bright spot is — as you might expect — its Weibo microblogging service, which it says has strong growth even with a ‘tightened regulatory environment.’ CEO Charles Chao ran down some key metrics from Weibo in their earnings call:

The total number of registered accounts for Weibo reached 368 million at end of June, up 13.6 percent from 324 million at the end of March. More importantly, the average number of daily active users […] grew by 21 percent from the month of March to the month of June and […] reached 36.5 million. The average number of daily active users as a percentage for the registered account increased to 10 percent in the month of June, as compared to 9 percent in the month of March, a strong indication of increased user activeness for Weibo platform. Among the daily active users, 69 percent used the mobile terminals to access the Weibo in the month of June, as compared to 64 percent in the month of March. [bold is mine]

Regarding the mobile vs PC breakdown of users, he says that about 69 percent access via mobile, with 30 percent of those overlapping onto PC (i.e. 40 percent are ‘pure mobile’). And as we pointed out last week, Sina is certainly nervous about how to successfully monetize mobile users.

Chao also noted on the call that Sina Weibo’s number of enterprise accounts sits at about 200,000 currently.

The company is expecting a third quarter boost as a result of the London Olympics and increased adoption of Weibo advertising. It also says that there are plans to launch Weibo version 5 in that quarter as well, which will bring ‘significant changes’ to profile pages as well as give users the ability to share with closed circles privately, possibly resembling Google Plus in that function.

But Sina is still postured for more of a marathon with Weibo than a sprint, saying that monetization ‘will largely dependent on the scale of its user platform,’ and so it will continue to invest in growing its users and improving user experience.

As everyone knows, PC use in China is dropping as it’s replaced by mobile. Wang says that in terms of Weibo, PC use has dropped 13 percent over the past year even as mobile use has risen by 14 percent. This means that now 52 percent of Sina Weibo users are accessing the site from a mobile client, as compared to just 32 percent accessing from PCs.

Those numbers shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone, but they have become sort of a big problem for Sina. Monetizing weibo with advertisements has proven difficult enough on the website, but monetizing the mobile app is even harder. And as Sina struggles to make money from weibo, the move to mobile also threatens some of its other core businesses, like its portal site. Wang points out that Sina Mobile has about one-third as many users as Weibo’s mobile app. That means something has been lost in the transition between the regular web and the mobile web. The problem, as Wang puts it, is that Sina’s portal was the “entrance” to the internet for many users on traditional PC connections. But in the mobile world of differentiated apps and platforms, portal sites aren’t the entrance anymore.

How can we become the ‘entrance’ to the mobile internet — we’re all bewildered by that, and we’re anxious or perhaps even frightened by it. If we can’t become that ‘entrance’ then the value of our business and our market share will not change [i.e., improve] significantly.

It’s an important question for Sina, and one the company has yet to find an answer to.

In the course of discussing Weibo, Wang also shared some interesting statistics about Weibo users. Android users now outnumber iPhone users (and all other phone users), for example. Among Android handsets used to access Sina Weibo, Samsung handsets are the most prevalent. Perhaps more surprisingly, Symbian users still outnumber iPad users, although that trend is presumably in the process of reversing itself. Most mobile users (60 percent) are China Mobile subscribers, and that includes iPhone users (more than 50 percent of them). It’s no surprise, then, that most mobile weibo users are still connecting to the service via wifi and 2G connections rather than 3G.

[Sohu IT via iMeiGu via Sinocism]

The whole infographic can be seen here (in Chinese only) but we’ve taken the liberty of translating a couple of the most interesting sections:

Interesting, no? The original infographic also notes that if every weibo post required its own mobile phone, the money that would be required to post that much content would be enough to build 34 London Olympic Stadiums. (But it’s not clear at all exactly how Sina is calculating that number).

This section came with some bonus goodies too: it turns out Apple users are night owls (they made more posts at night), other platform users were more likely to be up early. The most-followed keywords for each platform revealed some differences too; Apple users were interested in “muscles” and “pretty girls”; Android users were interested in “eating” and “uniforms” and users on other platforms were into “gold medals” and “referees.”

It is very interesting that iOS beat out Android for total post volume given the sheer number of Android devices currently at large in China. Perhaps Android users prefer Tencent Weibo? Or maybe Apple users are just more into the Olympics.

There’s one more stat in the graphic that might interest you. What are the top three places Weibo users are posting about the Olympics from? The bed, public transportation and — you guessed it — the toilet. I have no idea how Sina knows that, and I’m guessing I don’t want to know.

[via Sina Weibo]

We’ve gotten in touch with Baidu to ask for more details on exactly how this collaboration will work, and will update this post when we hear back.

Baidu and Sina are no strangers at this point. Sina has been using Baidu search technology on some of its websites for years, and Baidu added support for real-time Sina Weibo posts to its search engine earlier this year. With this newest agreement, the companies seem to be moving quickly towards a sort of seamless integration in which Baidu and Sina products work flawlessly together.

The move should also help Baidu bump up its market share in China’s mobile search market, where it is the market leader but not quite as dominant a force as it is in the field of regular web search. Integration with Sina on the wings of its integration into Apple devices is certainly making it look like Baidu is poised to see a big jump in its share of the mobile market, too.

[via TechWeb]

China’s liveliest Twitter-esque site, Sina Weibo, saw an Olympian 119 million ‘tweets’ about the London Olympics opening ceremony. The figure comes from Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) in an infographic in a post on one of its official accounts (see it here). That extraordinary amount of chatter dwarfs the 9.66 million tweets that Twitter said it counted up during the opening ceremony.

Sina Weibo has over 300 million registered users, which is fewer than the half billion who have signed up to Twitter. Nonetheless, Weibo users seemed to have proved to be chattier – perhaps aided by extra features like comments, and the extra space given to retweets that makes it a lot easier to propagate popular tweets. Of all those Olympics-related tweets, 59 percent were tweeted out by men.

Since Sina Weibo does have a number of overseas users – including over two million in Hong Kong – there was quite a bit of activity on it globally. Chinese users were unsurprisingly the most vocal, followed by a not insignificant 2.4 million Weibo posts from out of the UK, a fraction ahead of the number from the US:

As for specific highlights, there were 5.5 million mentions made on Weibo of the spectacular, Middle Earth-inspired Olympics cauldron, and 230,000 posts about Queen Elizabeth, who looked somewhat baffled and bothered by some of the playful opening ceremony antics. Oh, and there was that superb skit in which it was made to look like she and James Bond parachuted in:

As for Sina’s other services, the web portal boasts that it saw a peak of 49.35 million viewers of its licensed Olympics video stream.

China’s hottest Twitter clone, Sina Weibo, has diversified yet again with the launch of a platform for BBS-like discussion forums. Called “Weiba” (see its homepage here), the forums are open to all 350 million registered Weibo users, and cover specialist topics such as IT, cartoons, the Olympics, and other more niche subjects.

The move by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is a challenge to the country’s biggest search engine, Baidu, which runs the popular Tieba discussions platform that Weiba is clearly emulating (not least in its name). It should help Sina to keep users around on the site for longer and give it yet more screen real estate on which to put ads.

Weiba has been in beta since the end of last month, and brings a Twitter-like – or, rather, Weibo-like feel to the BBS genre, with users able to ‘follow’ forums and post discussions. One troublesome aspect might be Sina’s need to police its new feature very carefully, applying the same media directives – ie: censorship – to Weiba that it does to Weibo as a whole. (Baidu had to cripple its own Tieba forums recently, at the behest of authorities). One example is the way that Weibo was seemingly cleansed of photos of the recent Hong Kong protests. Going forward, we expect Weiba to be controlled just as tightly.

For the now massive Sina Weibo platform, it’s one more feature alongside many others, such as Tumblr-esque light blogs and social gaming.

BMW makes use of Sina's new "Weibo promoted ads" platform.

Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has been having a hard time making money out of its popular Twitter-esque site Weibo, and a report suggests that the next monetization step will be putting ads in the form of promoted tweets (yes, as Twitter is doing) in the timelines of Sina Weibo users (pictured above).

The ad product has been confirmed by a Sina representative to the Chinese blog Techweb, but there’s no timeframe for its official launch. The new social ads are called “Weibo Tui Guang” – literally: Weibo Promoted Ads – and the system is currently in beta testing with brands like automaker BMW and Chinese online travel agent Ctrip (NASDAQ:CTRP) already signed up and helping Sina to test them out. The promoted ads will carry the latest tweet from the participating brand, and they’ll show up at the top of a user’s timeline on the Weibo.com site – and perhaps in the official Weibo app too – before floating downstream.

It’s not clear how targeted these ads will be. For example, could a certain brand reach out only to users in a certain area of China, or only to users of a certain gender? That would make the new Weibo ad product a good way of giving social media followers some useful localized deals or information.

Sina Weibo has proved to be the hottest and most buzzed of the Twitter clones in China, soaring to 350 million registered users earlier this year. To offset its huge running costs – not least in terms of the amount of media censorship that authorities are requiring of it – Sina has been piling on features such as optional VIP memberships and a social gaming platform.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for ‘the truth’ cannot be displayed.

Discovered by netizens and reported in The Telegraph, the blocking of “truth” has gotten a fair amount of attention, perhaps because it is utterly ridiculous. However, Sina’s censors have been busy with lots of things of late, including deleting the account of the United States Consultate in Shanghai for no apparent reason and blocking searches for popular video games for, again, no apparent reason.

The truth is blocked in China, at least if you're searching for it on Weibo.

It is unclear why the truth has been blocked from weibo, or when it might return. It’s also not clear whether this is a genuine attempt to stop users from learning the truth about anything or merely Sina’s pre-emptive strike at potential satirists who might want to skewer the social network for its trigger-happy censorship policies. After all, there’s no way any satire could top this in terms of sheer balls-out ridiculousness.

Either way, it is worth noting that even in the absence of truth on Weibo, searches for lies remain unrestricted.

[via The Telegraph]

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is set to expand on the success of its Twitter-esque social media platform Weibo by launching a web TV service later today. At an event in Shanghai this afternoon, CEO Charles Chao is expected to unveil the social television service in partnership with Bestv New Media (SHA:600637), a Chinese company that has long specialized in web and mobile TV.

Aside from all that, details are scant, and we’ll need to see the service in action later today. The lack of a hardware partner suggests this won’t be based around a smart TV platform, which have really taken off in Japan and China in recent years. Instead, this is likely based entirely in the Weibo.com site, and will join a whole host of other social features that Sina has created in the past year such as social gaming and a virtual currency.

As such, Sina’s web TV will be a new challenge to the video-streaming sites in China – such as Youku, Tudou, Baidu’s Qiyi, and Sohu TV – with their mostly licensed TV serials and movies. With over 300 hundred million registered users, Sina Weibo offers a substantial captive audience to advertisers, and web TV will give more scope for advertising revenue.

[Source: Businessweek]

The official Weibo page of the US Consulate in Shanghai has met its end, today being blocked by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) with no explanation. Formerly on this page, the US Consulate joins the ranks of the New York Times and the Bloomberg accounts in all being blocked in recent weeks.

Instead the US Consulate has taken to a rival microblog service, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weibo, and is posting there instead. It was actually set up before today. See it here. The Tencent account is now that consulate’s primary outreach mode on the web. It has far fewer than the half million and more fans that were on its Sina Weibo page, with 102,000 at present. Other US Consulate pages remain online.

Its most recent post at 5pm local time today on Tencent Weibo is about the closure of its Sina Weibo account:

This morning we discovered that Consulate Shanghai’s official Shanghai page was not accessible. We are working to find out why, and we plan to resume normal operations as soon as possible.

It’s not known what has caused the apparent ban on that page. In such instances, it’s often the case that a tweet has crossed the line in terms of what can be discussed – especially in the realm of politics – and such tweets, or the entire microblogging accounts, will be deleted. Although the US Consulate has pointedly fled to a rival social media service, no one can say for sure if Sina is really the source of the censorship or if it’s acting on the instructions of authorities to avoid certain sensitive words being posted. Sina Weibo, being the hotter and more active of the two major Twitter-like services, is the one that sees the most high-profile censorship-related issues. Like this, this, this, this, this, or this. And there are plenty more examples. But Tencent Weibo, too, has content censors with fingers poised over the delete key.

Responding to the US Consulate’s banishment from Sina Weibo, the prominent China-born blogger Isaac Mao said:

I’m seeing the demise of Sina Weibo once all foreign consulates in China migrate their social media channel to Sina’s competitors. Just do it.

He himself has boycotted Sina Weibo in recent weeks, and has moved to using Tencent’s service instead. Meanwhile, Beijing-based investor and analyst Bill Bishop said:

Sina has now shut weibo accounts of Bloomberg, new York times & us government. And yet they enjoy all the benefits of the us capital markets

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

One world, two internets. And china’s overseas soft power push will fail as long as it maintains its repressive Internet policies

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

At what point do major us mutual funds decide they shouldnt hold $Sina because of its egregious censorship of us orgs? twitter.com/niubi/status/2…

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012

[Old screenshot source: BeijingShots]

"Oh, you silly cat. That's not how you spell 'cheeseburger'!"

Asia now has more than one billion internet users – or 1.016 billion, to be precise – who amount to 46 percent of the world’s total number of web users. More than half of those are in China. In addition, 623 million access the web via mobile phones. That’s the overview of the Asia-Pacific web scene depicted in a new report by the Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA), a non-profit organisation backed by corporate donors such as Google, Microsoft, and CNN.

For that fast-growing regional audience, ADMA cautions brands to think carefully before engaging in social marketing – “Although 60 percent of social networkers say that social networks are a good place to learn about brands, 50 percent also say they don’t want to be bothered by brands” – and to take care to note the “fragmentation of online activities” between different nations. Here are five eye-watering biz and marketing stats from ADMA’s David Ketchum:

• Online advertising spend in Asia-Pacific reached US$24.8 billion in 2011, making the region second only to the US, with $34.5 billion.
• Every marketing dollar spent online returns $1.78, exceeding the returns of all other marketing media including TV, print, out of home and trade (according to Nielsen).
• By 2015, Asia Pacific is expected to account for a third of all global mobile ad spend, reaching $6.92 billion.
• India, China, Australia and Japan are expected to generate $258 billion in commerce sales in 2012 between them, and mobile commerce is on the rise with 34 percent of mobile internet users in China and Korea transacting via handheld devices.
• Mobile app downloads reached five billion in 2011, generating $871 million.

Here are some of the key demographic tables from desktop internet users in Asia as a whole. It focuses on who’s online, Asia’s most trafficked sites (note Chinese web giants Tencent and Baidu), and where folks go for social media, online gaming, and e-commerce:

And here are three of the demographical highlights of mobile web users in Asia in the ADMA report. It’s interesting to note just how much more likely Asian mobile users are to do serious, practical stuff on their smartphones or feature-phones:

If you’re more into the consumer attitudes and marketing aspect of this and want to see ADMA’s report in full, grab it at the source link below.

[Source: ADMA’s Digital Marketing Yearbook report for 2012 (requires sign-in)]

Sina – makers of China’s hit Twitter-esque service Weibo – has got all its developers hitting copy-and-paste, producing a new social network that looks every bit a Path clone. Called Meyou – pronounced as “mee yo” and meaning “secret friends” in Chinese – the app has just launched for iPhone and can be seen in a demo video on its new homepage.

The whole concept of Meyou is the same as Silicon Valley-based Path as well, in that it’s about communicating with only your closest friends, and not the hundreds or thousands of followers that might be fans of your Weibo account. The Meyou app supports Weibo third-party login, but will not automatically import all your Weibo buddies, leaving you to choose who gets access to your thoughts within the app.

Here’s the main homescreen:

Path has been a big source of design inspiration – see here and here to highlight but two – in Chinese apps for over a year, so Sina is coming late to this no-longer-cool party. Path itself recently added support for a whole bunch of languages, including the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China.

The Sina Meyou app is now live in the iTunes App Store.

[Hat-tip to Techweb (article in Chinese) for spotting this]

China’s love affair with the car and the open road (traffic jams permitting) has only just begun, and so it’s a good time for local web company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) to launch its new map-oriented, location-based app for Chinese drivers. Called iMap – but with the literal name ‘Love Cars Maps’ in Chinese – it has just launched for Android and there’s an iPhone version coming soon.

The iMap app does five main things, and has social integration in many of those. It can be used for finding gas stations, parking spaces, getting routes and traffic build-up guidance, making crowd-sourced route reports, and it also has a neat parking assistant.

The first two of those features are reminiscent of what Google Places (or is it called Google Local now?) and Baidu Shenbian do already, with listings and reviews of nearby relevant places. The live traffic data is currently only supported in 11 Chinese cities, with others being added in due course.

As for the parking assistant, it’s a useful thingy to help you keep track of where you’ve parked – especially needed in a multi-level car-park – and for how long (pictured bottom).

Since Sina is the creator of China’s hottest social network these days – Sina Weibo – it should be no surprise that Weibo is tied in to the iMap app. It allows users to tweet out their reviews of petrol stations – fascinating! – or anything else you want to say without having to open the Weibo app on your phone.

Get Sina’s iMap app for Android from the third-party AppChina store for free, or just check out more photos below:

[Source: LBSvision - article in Chinese]

Or first inkling that something was up was this tweet:

Today, Sina.com blocks Hong Kong users sharing photos on Weibo. Any posts containing photos will be shown to yourself only!

— George Chen (@george_chen) July 2, 2012

We’re still working to confirm whether or not that’s true, but it got us interested enough to try a search for “Hong Kong,” and that’s when things got really strange.

Usually, search terms are either fully permitted or fully blocked, meaning that when you search for something, you either get all the results or nothing at all. Oddly, though, searching for Hong Kong returns a full first page with just three results, and although it indicates there are additional pages of results, as soon as you click onto the next page, you get a “no results found” error, as indicated in the screenshots below.

This is page 1 of the search results...

...and this is the second page, note the 'no results' error message at the top of the page.

This appears to be yet another way to censor things without them appearing to be censored at first glance. A user who searches for Hong Kong just to see if it’s blocked will find that it isn’t. But anyone who wants to read beyond the first page is going to quickly discover they can’t actually see anything that’s being said about Hong Kong. Similarly, if it is true that Hong Kong-based users can’t currently share pictures with anyone other than themselves, this allows those users to feel like they’re sharing (they can still upload the pictures, and see them in their feed) without actually letting them share.

Why Sina is doing this is a mystery, as like I said, surely it has absolutely nothing to do with the mass protests yesterday or the general anger surrounding Hu Jintao’s visit and the subsequent leadership handover ceremony conducted in a language many Hong Kongers don’t speak. The timing, I’m sure, is just a coincidence!

(For those of you immune to internet sarcasm: I’m joking. This episode of weibo censorship is quite obviously directly related to yesterday’s protests in Hong Kong).

Here’s another milestone for Flipboard in China, with the official launch today of Flipboard for Android ‘China Edition.’ It comes in partnership with the startup Android app stores Wandoujia and AppChina, which have been selected as the official distributors of the Chinese localized version of Flipboard for Android. The new app comes with lots of Chinese news and entertainment content, and supports sharing and syncing to two big social networks here: Sina Weibo and Renren.

This Chinese version of Flipboard can be downloaded right now from Wandoujia.com on this special page; and it’s here on AppChina as well. Like all of Flipboard’s moves in the country, this launch is being overseen by the U.S. company’s product manager for China, Alvin Tse. This new version will be on the Google Play store too.

Plus, to mark this event, the indie app store has bestowed upon Flipboard the “Wandoujia design award” in recognition of the sexy, slidey UI that has made the app a global hit. A Wandoujia representative, speaking to TiA over the weekend, said the startup team is expecting an extra “tens of thousands of app downloads a day” via this special promotion alone – aside from all the regular downloads that it’ll get on Wandoujia. The site’s co-founder, Wang Junyu, added:

Wandoujia and Flipboard both strive for simplicity and elegance. We hope the partnership will promote the value of design among Android apps in China.

Amen to that. As an Android user – on the newest 4.0 – I still have occasion to facepalm when I see a Chinese (or overseas) app that looks like it was coded with v1.5 in mind.

This local launch comes less than a week after Flipboard first hit the Android platform. Before this, its iPhone app came to China in March this year, following in the wake of the iPad ‘China Edition’ that came into life last December.

The deal is a coup for the Wandoujia, which is one of many third-party Android app stores operating in China from web companies both big and small. It capitalises on the fact that a great many Android users here prefer to avoid Google Play and instead use such independent stores, or just download the ‘.apk’ files from around the Chinese web as and when needed. Wandoujia also has an iTunes-like syncing app for Windows and Mac, giving Chinese Android users the missing sync that Google has never provided.

As for AppChina, it’s backed by the Innovation Works incubator, and wrapped up some major series A funding earlier this year.

Here’s a couple of promo shots of the Flipboard for Android ‘China Edition’ in action:
]]> http://www.techinasia.com/flipboard-for-android-china-launch/feed/ 2 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/sina-weibo-vip-paid-services/ http://www.techinasia.com/sina-weibo-vip-paid-services/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:20:35 +0000 Steven Millward http://www.techinasia.com/?p=81175 Read more »]]>

Sina Weibo, China’s 300 million user strong Twitter-esque social network, now has a VIP subscription service that charges a membership fee to users who opt for some extra features. It’s a new push by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) to monetize its popular but costly community after last year implementing social gaming and a virtual currency. Sina reported losses of $13.7 million in 2012 Q1, in part due to the costs of running the microblogging platform.

The VIP subscriptions on Weibo cost a flat 10 RMB ($1.57) per month for things like more personalized pages, voice posts, more mobile features, and better security (such as password reset via SMS). There are 15 VIP features in all. Discounts are available if users subscribe for longer periods, up to an annual fee of 108 RMB ($16.99). They’re available on the new vip.weibo.com page when signed-in.

(Click to enlarge)

It’s questionable how much Sina can raise from these kinds of premium subscriptions – and it’s not the first time it has tried, having earlier offered greater SMS tweeting support for a fee. Its other forms of monetization, such as via advertising, the strength and ubiquity of its Weibo brand pages, and its social gaming elements, will surely bring in more money. But if, for example, only 2 percent of Weibo’s active users opt for this annual subscription (being very optimistic in every respect and saying that 100 million are active), then this would net the company over 200 million RMB ($34 million) per year. Though that’s a lot of ‘ifs’.

A VIP Weibo user will be shown to the outside world by a golden crown icon on their profile page, as seen with the user @wenxiaogu (pictured above) who opted to pay for the service as soon as it launched yesterday.

Though an uncommon method of monetization on western social networks – where the right kinds of users tend to be worth more to advertisers than could be brought in by fees – it has been done long before by Sina’s rival, Tencent (HKG:0700), with its early social network QZone. But Tencent’s own microblog network, also called by the generic Weibo name, remains free.

[Source: Xinmin - article in Chinese]

The new options are accessible via the “block notifications” section on the account settings page, which displays all the apps a user subscribes to visually and allows them to block whichever apps they choose with a simple click. In the screenshot below, for example, you can see that I’ve blocked notifications from the “Weibo Games” app, but chosen to continue viewing notifications from other apps.

Like I said, it’s quite a minor tweak, but it should be a welcome respite for users who subscribe to lots of weibo apps and find themselves bombarded with inane notifications. It’s also just good to see that Sina is generally moving to include opt-out options for some of its services. Maybe someday it’ll add an opt-out option for censorship? (It won’t, but a man can dream.)

[via Sina Tech]

Sina Weibo’s new points-based ‘credit’ system is now live, representing a new sort of user contract in which microbloggers on the Twitter-like service will keep themselves in check by tweeting responsibly – that is to say, by not tweeting rumors or posting about sensitive political issues.

Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) explanation of the credit system is online here. It amounts to giving every one of the service’s 300 million registered users an initial 80 points. These units of credit will be deducted for posting rumors that Weibo’s censors-cum-moderators deem to be false, as a part of the authorities ongoing efforts to stamp out rumors on the web. The stiffest penalty is a deduction of 10 points for spreading false information that it retweeted/reposted more than 1,000 times. A tweet that is deemed dubious will be marked by a pink, rectangular warning message for all to see (though it’s not clear if that’ll be visible in the official or third-party mobile apps).

A user’s Weibo credit – a sort of Orwellian gamification of social media – will only be indicated when it runs low, and a warning message appears on that user’s profile page. On the flip side, the credit can be augmented by doing things like adding your national ID number to your account settings.

It’s hard to discern if this was mandated by authorities as a follow-up to the real-name registration requirement – which Sina later admitted it had implemented in a very lax fashion – or whether Sina is trying to make its existing moderation – ie: censorship – methods more transparent. We already know that Sina has eight distinct ways to shut up errant users and then ban those who don’t comply, so all this credit system seems to do is add a semi-opaque bit of number-crunching to it. We suspect that the more usual underhand modes of dealing with inconvenient information (or hearsay) – primary among these being keyword monitoring, deleting posts, and temporary audits of wayward users – will go on as before. The numbers are just a side-show. And none of that is explained away in its credit system.

Sina’s Credit Plan

Courtesy of the excellent report by the WSJ’s Josh Chin, here’s a careful translation of the points system from the Chinese web giant:

Weibo Credit is a user credit system established by Sina Weibo to safeguard a good atmosphere within in the Weibo community. Its purpose is to purify the Weibo environment and safeguard good order on Weibo by relying on the reports of numerous users to effectively reduce untrue information, invasions of privacy, personal attacks, plagiarized content, the assuming of others’ identities and harassment of others.

1) User Reports: According to the “Sina Weibo Community Management Regulations (Trial Version),” informers must be: verified individual users, organizational verified users, Weibo experts, mobile phone-bound or otherwise identity-verified users. Reports of untrue information, invasions of privacy, personal attacks, plagiarized content, the assuming of others’ identities, harassment of others, etc. will be entered into the Weibo Credit System.

2) Handling of Reports: After reports are submitted, according to the “Sina Weibo Community Management Regulations (Trial Version),” received reports will be handled after being evaluated by the Community Committee or the website and a decision will be made whether or not to dock the reported user’s credit points.

3) Credit Calculation: The credit score is part of a user’s information reflecting the user’s short-term credibility. The credit score = starting credit points + reward points – credit deductions.

4) Credit Grades: Different credit grades are given out according to credit grade and credit score regulations.

5) Low Credit Icons: Users who violate the rules and are reported by other users, resulting in a low credit grade, will have a “low credit” icon displayed on their home pages and other locations.

6) Credit Recovery: Low credit users who are not reported for violating rules over an appointed period of time will have their credit points restored to normal and the low-credit icon will disappear.

There are lots of ways to look at this data, and it’s no surprise to see Tencent way ahead of the rest of the pack. But the first thing that jumped out to me was the stark difference between what Tencent is making from its social networks and what Sina is making — or more accurately, what it isn’t making — from Weibo. Granted, Tencent versus Sina isn’t an entirely fair comparison when it comes to SNS, since Tencent has QQ, Weixin and Qzone in addition to its weibo service. But it’s certainly clear that Sina is having a very hard time monetizing its popular social network.

(Incidentally, it’s also worth noting Sina doesn’t seem to be making much of anything from its weibo gaming platform either. That’s not a huge surprise, as I’ve reviewed a number of the games and found them to be pretty bad, generally speaking, and way too blatant about begging for money.)

[via TechWeb]

Of course, what Sina’s release cleverly doesn’t say is how many of those 300 million users are “active users.” Nor does it define what it means by “active” — users who go on weibo once a day? week? month? — which is a bit shady. I have to assume that if Sina’s active user numbers were good enough it would be sharing them, so probably the fact that those numbers are conspicuously absent is an indication that active users are a pretty low percentage of that 300 million (or that Sina is counting its “active” users too generously to share the details for fear of criticism).

It’s also worth noting that Sina’s graph shows it breaking the 300 million user mark in February, before all this real-name stuff really went into effect. So far, Sina hasn’t shared any data on how that has affected user numbers, if at all. Anyway, here are some charts (English by me, charts by Sina):

There, wasn’t that fun?

[via Sina Tech]

There’s been an awful lot of hubbub about Sina Weibo’s planned introduction of a user contract. The terms will reportedly be implemented on May 28, and are being interpreted as another “crackdown” on weibo freedom of speech. Specifically, much of the discussion concerns article 13, which reads like this (translation via TheNextWeb):

Article 13) Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the honor or interests of the nation
4. Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
5. Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
6. Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability
7. Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes
8. Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings, and assemblies
9. Has other content, which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations, and national regulations

At face value, this certainly looks concerning, but it’s important to remember that this doesn’t actually change anything. Most of the language of this article comes directly from Chinese laws that are already in effect and already apply to Weibo users (just like they apply to everyone else in China). Even before the introduction of this code of conduct, weibo users have had their accounts closed — and in some cases have been held criminally liable — for violating these regulations. Sina putting them in writing looks repressive (and it is) but it’s worth remembering that Sina didn’t invent any of these conditions. They are pulled directly from Chinese law and are applicable to weibo posts regardless of whether Sina includes them in a user contract or not.

More concerning is the news that Sina will implement a points system and dock users who violate these principles. Users whose “credit” reaches zero will have their accounts canceled. That sucks, but again, let’s keep in mind that this was already happening; there are plenty of users who violated these rules over the past few years and found their accounts canceled (just ask Ai Weiwei) even though there was no points system in effect.

It’s not clear yet exactly how the points system will work, and it’s possible these restrictions will be used to close more accounts than would previously have been affected. But given how haphazardly Sina has implemented its real-name policies, I wouldn’t be surprised to find the points system has some gaping loopholes as well. It’s not in Sina’s interest to ban its own users, and the company will likely try to avoid doing that as much as it can. How successful it will be depends on the level of government intervention.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan of the points system or the user contract. Transparency is nice, but transparency about something repressive isn’t as great, and I don’t think this is really about transparency as much as it is about Sina looking like it’s doing something. Either way, my point is just that in practice, it’s not clear how anything on weibo will actually change as a result of this new contract. Article 13 is a rehashing of Chinese laws that absolutely apply regardless of Sina policies, and Sina’s censors have already been shuttering accounts that spread “sensitive” content for some time. Putting out a user contract and points system, I suspect, is just adding visibility to a system that has been in place since weibo’s initial launch.

In other words: does a punch hurt more if you see the fist coming?

Search results for 'left of his own volition' on Sina Weibo

This afternoon, the blind lawyer/dissident Chen Guangcheng left the US Embassy, where he had sought refuge after escaping illegal detention in his home village in Shandong. Chen is currently undergoing treatment at Chaoyang Hospital, accompanied by US officials and his family, who have been freed from their detention in Shandong and brought to Beijing to join him. The foreign press has been all over this, but official Chinese wire service Xinhua also released a statement condemning the US and saying that Chen had left the embassy “of his own volition.”

The term “left of his own volition” provides us an excellent opportunity to observe the way Sina censors handle the spread of information on Sina Weibo. “Left of his own volition” is a pretty specific phrase that isn’t likely to come up randomly in weibo posts all that often. And since we know exactly when the Xinhua story was released — 15:41 — we can track discussion of this phrase more or less from its inception using the search function on weibo, until it becomes a blocked search term.

What we found is that while Sina did not block “left of his own volition” as a search term — searches for blocked terms result in an error message — the company clearly took steps to smother discussion of the term by disabling the indexing of new posts containing the term. What that means is that while you can still search for posts with “left of his own volition,” you will only see results from before 16:50 this afternoon, which is approximately when Sina blocked the indexing.

To a casual user, it would appear no one is really using the term anymore; it looks like people are no longer talking it. But make no mistake, the “silence” is artificial; I intentionally used the phrase in a weibo post of my own to system at 16:50 and found that my post did not appear in the search results.

I call this “search smothering,” and it’s a tool I’ve seen Sina use increasingly over the past month or so as a way to play down discussions of sensitive topics and make it appear they aren’t happening. People can still make posts using the term, so they don’t feel their voice is being censored, and searches aren’t actually blocked so they aren’t reminded discussion is being censored, but public discussion is being hidden from them just the same. It’s quite clever, in an insidious sort of way.

If you’re wondering why bother, in this case, I suspect Sina began smothering the search because posts using the term were increasing rapidly as time went by. Before the Xinhua news release, posts using the term “left of his own volition” were coming in at a rate of far fewer than one post per minute. But as the news spread, uses of the term jumped and the posts-per-minute rate increased more or less continually over the next hour. I was keeping an eye on this and tracked the activity in the graph below; it should be pretty easy to see when the smothering went into effect:

It does appear there are ways to slip posts through the cracks. This post, for example, came in after the smothering went into effect, but it uses the traditional characters (rather than the simplified ones commonly used in mainland China) for the word “left” and thus appears to have crept through.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has released a report highlighting areas of concern where intellectual property rights – or, loosely, copyright – infringements “unfairly disadvantage U.S. rights holders in China” and around the world. It slams illegal IP abuse in many forms in China, from pirated digital downloads to fake toys and trade secrets.

One eye-catching claim made by the report is that “illegal downloads account for an estimated 99 percent of all music downloads in China.” It adds:

[T]otal music revenue (which includes both legitimate physical and digital sales) in China for 2010 was only US$64.3 million. This compares to almost $4.2 billion in the U.S., US$178.4 million in South Korea and US$68.9 million in Thailand — a country with less than five percent of China’s population and with roughly the same per capita GDP. If Chinese sales were equivalent to Thailand’s on a per capita basis, music sales would be almost US$1.4 billion.

But the USTR doesn’t back-up that figure with a source or even named examples. The report then turns to movies, TV shows, and sports broadcasts, and “urges the Chinese Government to focus on these streaming sites” that are featuring pirated content. 18 “popular video sites” are singled out by name “for allegedly providing a wide variety of pirated material” and suggests that the National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) review them for “shutdown when appropriate”. They are:

UUsee, Sina, Letv, Youku, Sohu, Baidu, Ku6.com, Joy.com, PPStream, verycd, Tudou, QQ.com, 56.com, Xunlei, Baofeng, Funshion, PPTV, and pipi.cn.

Note that the USTR almost certainly means just the Sina Video portal, not the whole of Sina (NASDAQ:SINA). Also, Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) mention could refer to its video search engine, or its Hulu-like Qiyi service. The USTR failed to specify. Most of the other sites will be familiar to regular readers, and comprise pretty much all the most popular streaming media sites in the country.

License to Kill Stream

While it can be difficult to buy a genuine physical music CD or movie DVD in China, and websites do still hold a lot of pirated content, the Chinese internet is actually a ray of IP hope. There are numerous popular sources of licensed TV shows, films, and music from around the world on video-streaming sites such as those from Youku (NYSE:YOKU), Tudou, (NASDAQ:TUDO), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU). Just last week, three of China’s major web companies teamed up to buy TV and movie rights without causing a bidding war. Youku has been partnering with Hollywood studios and US TV networks; and Baidu got itself removed from the US piracy watch-list last December after signing a landmark music rights deal that has formed the licensed downloads and streaming available on its Baidu Ting service.

The report does hail last year’s Baidu music deal as a positive example of engagement and progress. There’s also a mention for three e-commerce sites: Alibaba’s Taobao, Tencent’s Paipai, and eBay as well, noting that they “worked with authorities in an apparent effort to improve their IPR enforcement practices.”

Around the globe, thirteen nations are on the IP priority watch list in this new report for 2012: Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela.

The USTR also highlights the darker and more dangerous side of counterfeiting, where fake toys, pharmaceuticals, or semi-conductors (all very real problems) can cause injury or death. Grab the 53-page PDF from the USTR page below.

[Source: Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Special 301 report for 2012]

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), which runs the popular Twitter-like Weibo.com, has publicly admitted that it has not fully implemented the government-mandated ‘real name’ registration for such microblog services. The admission is made to investors in a new 20-F filing at the US SEC. It points out:

We are required to, but have not, verified the identities of all of our users who post on Weibo, and our noncompliance exposes us to potentially severe punishment by the Chinese government.

Spotted by Digicha, this confession highlights what an extraordinarily difficult situation Sina was put in by the real ID policy. We’ve been following this predicament closely, and so we’ve seen at first hand how Sina has been fudging this implementation so as to make life easier for itself and its 250 million registered users. One of the main ways was by asking users to verify their ID only with a phone number – since new SIMs can only be bought in China by showing your ID, Sina was passing the buck back to the authorities. And there have been some other obvious workarounds for users to take as well. All in all, Sina seemed to be behaving like a kid who’d been ordered to tidy his room, and was doing a deliberately bad job of it.

But there have already been consequences. The real name policy was put in place – in large part – to quash rumors circulating on Weibo. But when both Sina and rival Tencent (HKG:0700) failed to delete and control the false coup rumors earlier this year, both companies had their comments disabled by authorities for several days while they tidied up.

Looking back at Sina’s filing, it makes the excuse:

Although we have made significant efforts to comply with the verification requirements, for reasons including existing user behavior, the nature of the microblogging product and the lack of clarity on specific implementation procedures, we have not been able to verify the identifies of all of the users who post content publicly on Weibo.

Indeed, when we analyzed the popularity of trends on Weibo.com over the past two months, we found no significant drop-off in user tweeting and activity after the real ID deadline in mid-March. Sina admits that implementation “needs to be done over a long period” so as to make it seamless for users. That is to say, so as not to scare off users.

Investors in Sina should not underestimate the severity of possible actions that could be taken against the microblog service. The filing even mentions “termination of Weibo operations” (see the quote below) as one possible punishment by authorities. In China’s micro-censored media landscape, that is indeed not inconceivable.

Here’s the most relevant paragraph from Sina’s admission in full:

On December 16, 2011, the Beijing Municipal Government issued the Microblog Rules. Among other things, the Microblog Rules require users who post publicly on microblogs to submit their real identities to the microblogging service provider, which is required to verify the identities of its users. Under the Microblog Rules, users are required to disclose their real identity information only to the microblogging service provider and may still use a pen name to reflect their account name on the front end. In addition, microblogging service providers based in Beijing are required to verify the identities of all of their users, including existing users who post publicly on their websites by March 16, 2012. Although we have made significant efforts to comply with the verification requirements, for reasons including existing user behavior, the nature of the microblogging product and the lack of clarity on specific implementation procedures, we have not been able to verify the identifies of all of the users who post content publicly on Weibo. We believe successful implementation of user identity verification needs to be done over a long period of time to ensure a positive user experience. However, we may not be able to control the timing of such action, and, if the Chinese government enforces compliance in the near term, such action may severely reduce Weibo user traffic. The implementation of user identity verification has deterred new users from completing their registration on Weibo and a significant portion of those who have provided identity information to us was rejected by the Chinese government database, which means that these users will have limited posting ability in the future and may cause the level of activity of Weibo users to decrease over time. Furthermore, while the Microblog Rules are not clear regarding the type and extent of punishment that will be imposed on non-compliant microblogging service providers, we are potentially liable for noncompliance of the Microblog Rules or related government requirements, which may result in future punishment, including the deactivation of certain features on Weibo, termination of Weibo operations or other punishments determined by the Chinese government. Any of the above actions may have a material and adverse impact on our share price.

[Sources: Sina’s Form 20-F, via Digicha]

Over the past few weeks we have noted how more individuals and companies are flocking to Chinese microblogs in an effort to reach out to Chinese people. The premier of Victoria Australia Ted Baillieu as well as opposition leader Daniel Andrews both took to Sina Weibo last month to reach Chinese speakers in their city. And now former Australian prime minister and foreign minister Kevin Rudd, who actually speaks Mandarin Chinese, has finally jumped on Weibo as well.

For Rudd’s first tweet, he sent a short thank you note to CCTV International host Rui Chenggang:

@ruichenggang hello. Thanks for encouraging me to start using weibo! I hope to have many opportunities to chat with my Chinese friends. Lao Lu.

He also noted that he hasn’t used Chinese characters in a long time, and when noting that his characters are like a five year old, he used the wrong character for ‘five.’ The error was quickly corrected by his followers, but many reacted that the mistake was ‘cute.’ Rudd then said perhaps his writing is closer to that of a four year-old. Indeed it’s this kind of genuine interaction that’s likely to win him an even greater number of admirers.

So far Rudd has over 116,000 followers since joining back on April 18th. His approach certainly contrasts with that of London mayor Boris Johnson, whose own weibo blunders we wrote about last week.

As we recently noted, Chinese is reportedly soon going to overtake English as the dominant language on the web, so expect more high-profile people and brands [1] to use weibo as a means to reach out to this portion of the web.

[Via Sydney Morning Herald]

We’ve done an awful lot of talking about weibo real-name registration here at Tech in Asia, because it’s both interesting and important. But one thing we haven’t talked about is how Sina’s half-assed approach to the real name rules has affected how many people are actually using the site.

While it’s a far cry from having any official numbers, I’ve been tracking a few key metrics since late February. Now that real name registration, at least in its current iteration, has been in place for a while, I thought it might be useful to share these numbers.

I tracked five very simple statistics: the total number of posts about the top two trending topics on any given day, the posts-per-minute count for those same two trending topics, and for kicks, the posts-per-minute count for my own personal weibo feed. I recorded all five of these stats once each workday at 2:00 P.M., from late February through last week (although I missed a few days here and there when I happened to be away from a computer at 2:00).

Now, before we start, you should take these numbers with several grains of salt, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I collected all this manually, so there’s a chance of human errors in the data, (as evidenced by the fact that I missed a couple days). Also, as the trending topics aren’t entirely automatic — Sina can and occasionally does artificially insert or delete topics from their list — looking at them might not really be representative of the overall discussion on weibo. But with very limited time, I figured these were good, simple things to track and if there was a huge drop-off in traffic, it ought to be evident even in this flawed data.

I’ve posted charts and my own conclusions below, but you can also click on the charts to view an interactive version or take in the raw data right here. You’ll note that in order to make the charts readable, I’ve had to toss out the numbers from a few days with extremely high post counts. For example, a topic about Tomb Sweeping Day on Tomb Sweeping Day was running at more than sixty posts-per-minute; it does not appear in the graph because including it would have made it difficult to actually see any trends that might exist on more “regular” days when counts are generally much lower.

Also, for reference, the real-name rules began going into sorta-effect on March 18, and seemed to be being rolled out gradually over the next few days, so that’s the point you want to look for to see if there’s a noticeable difference before or after it.

By Total Posts

How much are people saying about the hottest social media issue of the day? Would those numbers decrease after the real name rules went into effect? I measured the total posts for the top two trending topics at 2:00 PM each day, and here’s what I found:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Looking at these two charts, it’s difficult to see much of a pattern. There’s a definite downward slope in the number of total posts about the trending topic number two, but it isn’t mirrored in the results for number one, so it’s impossible to tell which is a more accurate depiction of what’s really happening. From the two of them, though, we can at least tell that there apparently hasn’t been a massive drop in traffic or usage, and the most interesting topics are still attracting huge numbers of posts.

Posts-per-minute

I also tracked posts-per-minute for the number one and number two trending topics using a very simple method: counting. Since all weibo posts have a timestamp, it’s actually pretty easy to figure out how many posts appeared in a trending topic’s feed within one minute’s time. What I generally did was pick a minute around 2:00 PM and count the number of posts made in that minute, and then double-check with a few other minutes around 2:00 just to be sure I hadn’t gotten a fluke and that the number I got was generally representative of how frequently people were posting about the topic. Unscientific, to be sure, but it’s better than nothing, right? Here we go:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Here, too, it’s hard to see a definitive pattern. Maybe there’s a slight downward trend there, but it’s definitely nothing earth-shaking, and it’s clear that posts are still coming in with some frequency when the topic is hot enough.

By personal feed

Just for the heck of it, I also decided to track the posts per minute that appeared in my personal weibo feed. I only follow 71 people on weibo, so it’s a much slower trickle of posts, and I didn’t expect this data to be particularly useful, but I think it may have turned out more indicative of the reality than anything else I tracked. Here’s what I saw:

Click to view an interactive version of this chart.

Yup, I saw basically nothing. There’s really no pattern there at all. If I hadn’t been following the news and notified about it by Sina, I wouldn’t have even realized anything had changed.

Conclusions

I think that — nothing — is likely what most weibo users have experienced over the past few weeks. Certainly, they’re aware of the real name rules as some were forced to register, some were automatically registered and notified about it afterwards, and others had weirder things happen. But in terms of user experience, quantitatively, there doesn’t seem to have been a huge change. But of course, this is just a month or so of data from a very limited set of metrics. We’ll have to wait longer to see what the effects really are, especially if the anti-rumor campaign eventually leads to Sina being forced to implement a stricter (i.e. actually effective) real-name policy.

Qualitatively, it’s even more difficult to tell if things have changed. Has the quality of discourse altered? Are people being cowed into silence now that microblog providers theoretically have all their information on file? It’s hard to tell. Certainly the fact that rumors of a coup d’etat were being spread on weibo immediately following the real-name implementation seems to indicate the service’s political elements have not been scared into silence.

But it’s early yet, and everybody — Sina, the government, the users — are in this thing for the long haul. Let’s all keep watching.

The ‘Internet Society of China’ (ISC) has today released a paper entitled Written Proposal on Resisting Internet Rumors that aims to use a mixture of education and stricter regulations to prevent gossip and hearsay spreading across the tightly-controlled Chinese internet. Coming just nine days after authorities punished China’s two largest Twitter-like sites for failing to suppress political rumors, it comes across a lot like the much-vaunted “war on terror” whereby the Bush-era US government sought to defeat any rogue elements that might harm it.

Trouble is, both rumors and terrorism are abstract concepts, and you can’t win a war against a concept. And as an unjust war breeds a new generation of malcontents driven to extreme actions, so a new wave of internet clampdowns, regulations, and censorship will create even less transparency in Chinese politics and the web that might drive netizens to more conjecture and gossip. China’s microblogs, like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, already have an expensively large crew of staffers engaged in self-censorship, deleting posts that contain keywords that threaten “social stability” (a new propaganda watch-word which is mentioned several times in today’s ISC paper) and banning users as well. On top of that there’s the newly-implemented ‘real name’ policy on the Weibo services that’s supposed to squash rumors by making people feel responsible – or scared? – about what they tweet to their microblogs. But, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700) are swamped, and the punishment for most is just a deleted comment. Weibo users know this, and so are still engaging in gossip – even of a political nature – amidst the grim darkness of the lack of transparency in both government and news and web media who comply with all media regulations or else face being shut down.

And so a war on rumors is now underway, characterized by greater surveillance of ordinary folks as if everyone is somehow guilty. Just like how the war on terror massively bolstered the US and UK police state. But where the west has seen advanced face-recognition cameras, and full-body airport scanners, Chinese authorities already have all forms of media in a strangle-hold; it just needs to get a tighter grip. Trouble is, there’s not too much else that can be done – the recent false coup rumors saw the afore-mentioned Weibo clampdown on commenting along with six people arrested for propagating the initial rumor. What else is there? Arrest hundreds? Demand that Twitter-like sites have a built-in delay of a few minutes? Require people submit their tweets via fax to the local police bureau? OK, that last one is plain facetious. But how can progress be made in banishing rumors online when Chinese web users see no light, no progress, from authorities themselves?

8 Ways to Banish Rumors?

The ISC paper – see it here (in Chinese) – today puts forward eight points for how the web can be made to have only “a positive impact on economic, political, cultural and people’s lives,” and not engage in behavior that can cause “a major social nuisance, serious violations of civil rights, harm the public interest” or “also endanger national security and social stability.” Seven of the eight put the onus on web companies and people themselves, with little in the way of self-awareness that the media landscape might need to be altered as well. Here are all the pointers in summary:

1. The first point in the white paper calls for a greater “awareness of the law” as it exists already along with tighter “industry self-regulation.”

2. The next one gets more lyrical, suggesting that the web be geared towards promoting “Chinese culture, a socialist culture” and “healthy web content” such as “spreading scientific theories.” And while that’s great, it doesn’t address the human need for news.

3. Enhance “social responsibility” of those working in online media to vet content, and greater “corporate social responsibility” to “resolutely cut off Internet rumors” on forums, microblog sites, and anywhere else online.

4. “Strengthen internal control mechanisms” at web companies and ensure active “content screening.” Very similar to the third point, really.

5. Employers should be encouraged to have their “website employees conscientiously fulfill their legal responsibility” in making an ethical and healthy web, and better “distinguish” those netizens who will be more likely to propagate rumors. Again, a lot of overlap with points three and four.

6. All social media “shall comply with the government’s internet ‘real name’ authentication requirements” which are already in place on the major Weibo platforms.

7. [Media/web companies] should “listen to the opinions of web users, and work hard to rectify the issued noted by the public.” Finally, a glimmer of awareness of what’s the root cause of the frustration of many on the web! But this seems superfluous alongside the calls for more efficient controls.

8. “Strive towards the majority of internet users actively supporting web companies in resisting and banishing online rumors.” This is an especially vague one, and has the air of turkeys voting for Christmas.

And that, in all its vague and blustery glory, is all that the ISC paper has to offer.

To get an idea of how opaque things are – and getting worse by the year, to be frank – in both online and offline media, note that the official line on the recent Weibo punishment and arrests was deleted from the website of state news agency Xinhua. Here’s the blank page. Let’s not speculate why. But plenty of netizens are still writing, retweeting, and commenting on rumors – and precisely because it’s getting harder and harder to get objective news.

That leaves Sina and Tencent – and whichever web company will have the next social media success – struggling to sift false rumors (along with the very many keywords which are currently banned for utterly opaque reasons) from thousands of Weibo tweets per second. And that too sounds like an unwinnable war.

[Hat-tip to William Farris on G+ for spotting the ISC article]

These apps capture short videos of fun things that are happening to you, and let you share them to microblog sites like Sina Weibo. Many Chinese-made apps of this kind also feature video-filters so that you can stylize your mini cinematic exploits as well. Among the competition, users can pick out which app best suits their needs based on what kind of a social network it involves, which services it can sync/share to, and how much they can customize their clips.

Here are the ten main social video-sharing apps coming out of China right now: seven are from startups, three from major web companies. In each instance, click on the red-highlighted name of the app to get it from its homepage:

WeiPai

Video upload limit: 3 minutes
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

The first such social video app that I tried was this one, Weipai. Now maturing nicely into a social network filled with young, smartphone-toting users, its iOS app is looking well polished and already up to v3.0. But, very bizarrely, its Android app is buggy and very rough, left pretty much abandoned since it came out last summer. With more Chinese on Android than iOS by some metrics, that seems like an unwise choice.

WeiKu

Video upload limit: 30 seconds
App for iOS only (with Android in the works)
Video filters: Yes

We looked at Weiku quite recently, and found that it decided to limit videos to just 30 seconds in length. The app developers apparently believing that was quite enough time for your friend to show his no-hands biking or for your cat to look adorable. On top of that it has built a mini-social network (as have most of these apps) where you can browse video missives from fellow users of the app.

iSheHui

Video upload limit: None
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

The two founders of iShehui snagged funding from Cyberagent Ventures back in February that amounted to 10 million RMB (US$1.59 million). The company claims that its app has been downloaded just over two million times, and it features the usual array of fellow members’ videos to browse and several methods of sharing your videos.

Movie360

Video upload limit: None
App for iOS only
Video filters: Yes

This is the only app that’s not free, costing 18 RMB in the Chinese app store. From the makers of Camera360, this Movie360 app is a little different from the others in this list in that it really is just an app that’s stripped of ancillary social networking. Instead of all that, you upload your video straight to major video platforms such as Youku, Sina Video, or YouTube. The Chengdu-based Pinguo startup behind this employed the same tactic with its photo-filter app, which has enjoyed some international success as a result.

Yi Xia

Video upload limit: None
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

We looked into Yi Xia last December and found it to be buggy yet promising. In the intervening months, it has gotten a bit more stable and also had a facelift so that it now resembles the American app Path. With 36 video filters to choose from, it has more stylistic choice than all the others.

Vida

Video upload limit: 20 seconds
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

Vida began as just a photo-sharing app – but it recently got updated to support short (very short – just 20-second) videos using its array of real-time filters that it called “insta-render.” With a swish UI and a pretty dynamic social network attached to it, videos are still a small part of its service. Vida has explained to the Chinese media that video uploads are currently only 5 percent of its resources right now.

Vlook

Video upload limit: None
Apps for iOS, Android, and Symbian
Video filters: None

The Vlook app looks the most basic of the selection made by startups (the six apps above this one in the list) and is the only one that lacks video filters.

Sina Paike

Video upload limit: None
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

And now we get to the big boys. Made by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), this app is hard-wired to Sina Weibo, its popular microblog service. Though it could also be used to do some citizen journalism – which is idiomatically demoted by the “Paike” phrase used in the app’s name – Sina’s app still retains an element of fun with a choice of photo filters.

Youku Paike

Video upload limit: None
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: None

Youku Paike launched earlier this year, and has more of a news-oriented flavour. The app lacks any filters and is filled up mostly with other users’ submitting reports about things happening across the country. As such, it’s not very good as a social video-sharing app – but perhaps Youku (NYSE:YOKU) was aiming instead for clicks and hits coming from breaking news. This isn’t the place for your doe-eyed puppy videos.

Q Pai

Video upload limit: 30 seconds
Apps for iOS and Android
Video filters: Yes

Sina’s main microblog rival, Tencent (HKG:0700), is a bit behind the curve with its Q Pai app, where the video capturing is a bit buried in its mainly photo-oriented feature-set. Geared mainly to work with Tencent products such as QZone and Tencent Weibo, it’s of no use to any people who might want to tweet their videos to Sina Weibo.

The real-name saga is ongoing in China, but I’m still able to tweet via Sina Weibo through its iPhone app. I have to admit that the real-name controversy keeps me going back to Weibo recently to check if the rule has been enforced or if I really need to put in my real identity. So while on the app I’m either weibo-ing or gaming.

Its iPhone app is like a mini social mobile gaming center. The games are pretty straight forward, much like the games you play on Mobage or GREE. But the ease of social communication makes it special. I usually weibo and then head over to the game section and then back to weibo. My favorite game is poker, which is usually fast and quite addictive to play. The Three Kingdom game looks interesting but is slow to load for me.

I’m also pretty impressed by how Sina Weibo has evolved along the way, adding more features to make the service more rich and meaty, but yet not cluttered. With mobile games and also pages for brands, Sina Weibo now looks more like a Facebook than a Twitter, if you really must compare it with Western services. It makes me wonder if Twitter might have plans to do something similar. Sina Weibo is better than Twitter in many ways. The only thing that kept me staying on Twitter is my friends.

The Sina Weibo iPhone app is more than just weibo and games, though. Below are two other features that I find myself coming back to:

1. Most commented/reposted: Tapping on this feature allows you to see all the weibos/tweets which are the most commented/reposted. If you don’t know what to do when you’re stuck in a taxi, reading the comments is a sure way to suck up your time and also keep yourself updated.

2. WeiboApps: There’s an app store within the app, and it isn’t just promoting Sina’s apps. That’s also one of the places I go to check for the latest and coolest app in China.

It is also worth mentioning the Microdata feature which helps to analyze your weibo influence.

So that’s a brief run through on the features on Sina Weibo iPhone. Of course, as with Twitter, there are third-party alternative apps for Weibo that you might prefer, offering a more minimal UI – and in one case an English interface.

If you’re curious about what’s going on in China, Sina Weibo is one of best avenues to explore. While the app interface is in English, the content is 99.99 percent in Chinese. So it’s still very much a Chinese-language-only experience, unfortunately.

The Tencent penguin's scarf isn't always just a fashion accessory.

It’s no secret that Sina Weibo’s laissez-faire attitude towards implementing real-name registration and controlling (false) coup d’etat rumors has had some pretty serious consequences. The other day, a friend of mine raised a question I think we’ve spent too little time on in our discussion of these incidents: why? Why would Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) risk the ire of regulators by being so haphazard in its implementation of the real name rules? I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.

This is not a mistake

First of all, I don’t believe it’s possible that the many holes in Sina’s real-name requirements are just bugs or inadvertent mistakes. Sina Weibo itself is a very solid product, and Sina obviously has the talent on staff to do real name right if it wants to. Moreover, even if there were a few bugs at first, it has now been several weeks, and many of these issues have been openly discussed on weibo since day one. If Sina really wanted to close these holes, it’s very hard to imagine they couldn’t.

Nor do I believe Sina simply felt their gigantic user base made them untouchable, as though they could do whatever they wanted without fear of government intervention. There is no internet service that is too big for the government to shut down if it decides it’s too much of a risk, and Sina knows this. As I wrote last week, the government shut off the internet in an entire province (save a few local sites) for months, it certainly would have no qualms about shutting down a single microblogging service if the stakes were high enough. Sina is one of China’s oldest internet companies, and I can’t imagine it has any misconceptions about its own invincibility. No one is invincible.

So why would Sina do this on purpose?

Why would Sina be so lax in implementing real-name restrictions, and why would it allow rumors of an attempted coup to spread after those regulations were supposed to be in place? There are plenty of theories, but I personally believe there are a few reasons:

Sina was testing how serious the government is. Needless to say, a totally unrestricted weibo is better for business. It means higher user numbers and probably higher user activity, and all of that means more money. Given that, it’s in a microblog operator’s best interests to do as little as possible to restrict user access. In implementing real name rules in such a half-assed way, my guess is that Sina was testing whether the Beijing government wanted actual change or just the appearance of change. If the latter, Sina’s initial implementation would have been good enough, and if the former, failures might be explained away as ‘working out the kinks in a new system.’ Either way, Sina needed to find out what the government really wanted so that it didn’t block out any more users than it really needed to.

The spread of rumors actually looks good (from a certain perspective). Although the government is primarily concerned with maintaining stability and its image of unity, Sina is in the difficult position of having to please two masters. Users and investors were collectively concerned that real-name restrictions might hurt weibo by reducing user activity or cowing people into silence. While the spread of coup rumors has clearly gotten Sina in some trouble with the government, it has also helped show that users are still there, still active, and still talking politics. This benefits Sina, and the company may have decided that benefit outweighed the risk of a potential crackdown.

The risks are relatively minor. Because the real-name regulations had just gone into place and because the government hadn’t really drawn a clear line in terms of how tightly rumors needed to be controlled, Sina could be relatively sure that if the laissez-faire approach backfired, it would get some kind of warning from the government first, rather than being completely shut down. And indeed, the site has been “punished” and comments are shut off through tomorrow morning, but the service is still available and no major damage was done to the company. It’s impossible to be sure, but I suspect that this outcome is actually much better for Sina than it would have been if the company had implemented real-name rules and stricter censorship on its own a few weeks ago. Now, Sina looks like the victim rather than the opressor, and that’s good for Sina even if the end result for users is the same experience.

The SIIO announcement that Sina and Tencent had been punished for allowing rumors to spread, and Sina and Tencent’s subsequent closing of their commenting features for several days, indicates that the government is drawing a line of sorts. We don’t know what was said behind closed doors, so it’s difficult to determine whether Sina will attempt to implement real-name rules any more seriously, but certainly it will need to keep a tighter lid on rumors with potential political implications.

Of course, this is all just my own opinion, and no one knows what’s going to happen next. Feel free to share your own theories in the comments, or check out what Weibo users are saying about the ban and a relevant Xinhua editorial from yesterday about the spreading of rumors.

According to a Xinhua report from late Friday evening, a spokesman from China’s National Internet Information Office has announced that several internet companies, including Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700), have been legally punished for permitting the spread of unfounded rumors. Specifically, the report cites unfounded rumors that were spreading like wildfire on Sina Weibo of an attempted coup d’etat happening in Beijing. [Update: All comment viewing and posting is now banned. Scroll down for a screenshot].

It’s not clear exactly how the companies were punished — the report just says that they were “seriously criticized and punished accordingly” — but the language is quite strong. The rumors are referred to as exerting an “evil influence” on society, and those who spread them are called “lawbreakers” who acted “maliciously” and “without reason.” Xinhua is China’s official state wire service, and these words were probably carefully chosen.

The report ends with this sentence: “The two companies [Sina and Tencent] expressed that they would thoroughly implement the relevant regulations, take steps to reform themselves, and increase their supervision [of content].” That is very significant, especially if you’re a weibo user.

Earlier today, I wrote a piece about several different ways Sina’s real-name regulations could be evaded, and it has certainly seemed to me like Sina hasn’t been taking things very seriously. Tonight’s Xinhua report, however, may foreshadow significant changes. We don’t know what kind of punishment Sina or Tencent received, but it’s clear Chinese regulators want them to shape up, and since those regulators have the power to shut them down permanently, it’s hard to imagine they won’t comply.

Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have grown into massive powerhouses, and even after the real-name rules went into effect (kinda), they still have impressive user numbers. But don’t be fooled into thinking that would stop the government from shutting them off entirely to prevent the spread of rumors it sees as extremely harmful — like, say, rumors of a failed coup during a time of leadership transition. People who suggest the government wouldn’t shut down weibo because it’s too popular may be forgetting that just a few years ago, the government turned off basically the entire internet in Xinjiang, a province with over twenty million inhabitants, for months after unrest occurred there. If they think weibo poses a real threat to social stability, they will not hesitate to pull the plug.

But it will never come to that, because Sina and Tencent aren’t stupid. They may have been playing fast-and-loose with the real name regulation rules so far, but they both understand that complying with regulators is the only way a company can do business in China. (Don’t believe me? Ask Google.) So, if you’re on weibo, expect to see significant changes in the months ahead (and maybe don’t retweet those coup rumors unless you’re interested in getting to know your local State Security agents a bit better). Real-name registration hasn’t significantly impacted the discourse on Chinese microblogs yet, but I have the distinct feeling that the music is about to stop.

UPDATE: Both Sina and Tencent Weibo have now suspended commenting services. Users can still post and retweet weibo messages, but attempting to comment on them results in an error message saying that the commenting feature of the site has been suspended until April 3. Reportedly, six people have also been arrested for the spread of the coup rumors. Here’s what Weibo users now see in the comments area on the Weibo.com website (similarly with Tencent’s t.qq.com):

[Via Xinhua, h/t to @eobserver, image via Shutterstock]

Why users might want to post without having to provide Sina with their state ID number and real name is no mystery. Some see it as a violation of privacy, and many worry that it could be used to track down users who help spread stories critical of the government. If you like Sina Weibo but agree you’d rather not share your personal information with the company and any Chinese policemen who might ask for it, read on. I’m going to show you a few ways you can keep using Weibo without revealing your real name.

Before I do, though, please note that none of these methods are guaranteed. For whatever reason, many of these methods work for some users and don’t for others. But if you really want to Weibo, some of these could be worth a shot.

1. Get Lucky

For some reason, some Sina Weibo users — myself included — found themselves registered automatically when the real-name regulations were put in place. Despite not having bound a cell phone to their accounts or providing Sina with any identification information, these users received messages from Sina thanking them for providing their information and informing them they could continue to post as usual. As this happened to me, I double-checked my account settings, and all the ID information sections are blank, so it’s clear Sina doesn’t have any real information on me. I’m still able to post. However, if this hasn’t happened to you already, there’s no way to make it happen, so let’s move on to the next one…

2. Post Using a Mobile Client

Some users — including my wife — are reporting that even though their accounts have been blocked from posting when they access them via the web, they are still able to post messages to Weibo via Sina’s official clients for Android and iOS. Although Sina is using real-name registered phone numbers to get users ID information without seeming invasive, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, as accounts that post this way remain unregistered — i.e., unable to post — on the web, and posting from a mobile client still works when using a SIM card that was purchased before China’s real-name phone regulations and thus doesn’t have any real-name information attached to it.

If you want to be totally secure, you’ll want to use that mobile client only with unregistered SIM cards, or just remove the SIM card completely and use a wifi connection whenever you fire up the Sina client. We’ve heard whisperings that the mobile clients may be secretly sharing lots of information about your phone with Sina.

3. Set Your Account Location to “Overseas”

Since Sina Weibo does not yet accept passport numbers or any forms of ID besides Chinese ID numbers, the company has been allowing overseas users to post without registering their real ID information. Some users inside China changed their account settings to say they were “overseas” before the hammer dropped, and these users have been able to continue posting. If you didn’t do that before the regulations went into place, it’s probably too late for your current account, but what you can do — if you don’t mind starting from scratch — is register a new account and set your location to “overseas.” This will allow you to post without restrictions, regardless of your actual location.

4. Buy a Cheap SIM Card, Register With That Number

If you’re willing to be sort of break the law — and spend a little money — in your quest to get on Weibo, the most foolproof way to post without surrendering your personal information is to purchase a new SIM card for your mobile phone and then bind that phone number to your weibo account. The key here is when you purchase the SIM card, refuse to give the seller your ID information, or request that they fill in some fake information. Technically, sellers are not supposed to do this, but plenty of smaller shops are willing to. In fact, some even advertise it as a service.

Obviously, there are some moral issues with this one. Trying to get shopkeepers to break the law isn’t a great idea, and moreover, you have to wonder whose stolen identity is being used to register your number — is that guy going to get dragged to prison if you say something edgy on Weibo? We don’t advocate using this method. But technically, it does work.

It’s interesting that Sina’s real-name system continues to be so easily avoided. Obviously, this benefits Sina, but could it put the company in danger if regulators interpret the laxness as Sina not taking their orders seriously? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, it’s also unclear what sort of an impact, if any, real-name regulations have had on user numbers and user activity. Sina hasn’t shared any statistics on this, but it may just be too early to tell. We’ve been tracking a few numbers of our own here at Tech in Asia but we want to keep following them a little longer before we suggest any conclusions. In the meantime, happy registration-free microblogging!

[Part of image via Shutterstock]

Flipboard pushed out the iPhone version of its localized app for China last week – and now the startup is saying that it aims to have five million Chinese users on iOS very soon.

The iPad version of Flipboard’s Chinese edition launched last December, integrating with local social networks Sina Weibo and Renren. That approach was mirrored in its new release for the iPhone.

With that solid base on iOS and a great-looking, well-localized app, Flipboard’s Alvin Tse (pictured right) has told Chinese media that the company’s plan is “five million downloads in mainland China on iOS this year.” Of course, downloads don’t equate directly to users – or even active users – but it’s still a size-able goal that the startup is working towards.

Working With Sina

Flipboard remains a small company with offices, apart from its Silicon Valley base, in New York and London, employing 55 staffers in total. There’s no plan for a China office, Alvin reveals, but says that the team understand the importance of making a localized version of an app for this “completely different market.” Alvin himself has Hong Kong roots, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is tasked with crafting business development on Flipboard’s Chinese edition apps – picking out content partners and overseeing the right kind of social media integration, such as the way you can tweet to Sina Weibo from right in the app so as to share an article with friends.

The interview revealed that Flipboard has long been working closely with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), and that Sina CEO Charles Chao once flew to the startup’s main office to talk turkey, and showed himself to be an avid user of Flipboard’s original version (before that Chinese edition came out last December).

Alvin says that Flipboard is still seeking new Chinese content for its app but will not add a source unless they have full permission to do so.

And so the US company might be on the verge of an all too rare social media success in China. We’ll keep you posted if/when that five million milestone is reached. We get the feeling it will indeed happen this year – despite a wealth of clones from major web companies like Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) as well as newcomers such as Zaker.

[Source: Donews - article in Chinese]

Thinking about setting up an enterprise weibo account for your company, business, or pyramid scheme? Sina has a whole report for you — which we’ve been dissecting bit by bit by bit — but this latest piece may be more to the point: do people really want to follow enterprise weibo accounts? And if so, what kind of people? Sina’s report includes the results of a survey that offer some answers to that question.

It’s not clear from Sina’s report how many weibo users were surveyed in total, or who did the surveying, so take these results with a grain of salt or two. Anyway, here’s what weibo users said when asked how they felt about being getting personalized recommendations of enterprise weibo accounts to follow:

Does this make you more or less likely to set up an enterprise Weibo account? I suppose it depends on your target demographic, but clearly Sina thinks you’re going to be impressed by this. We’ll have more from its weibo user survey in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!

While I do agree that 1060 overseas enterprise Weibo accounts aren’t too many, it’s a good sign that Sina Weibo is able to attract at least some overseas entities – many of them of a very high calibre, in fact. Sina claims that there are 143 Fortune 500 companies are on Weibo. If these Fortune-listed companies are considered early adopters, then many other companies abroad might follow their lead.

Sina Weibo is available in English on iOS but not on the web. I was told at a recent Net Impact conference in Jakarta that Sina Weibo is geo-targeted with its English interface available upon detecting a U.S IP. But our own test doesn’t seem to reflect that. So as far as we can see, Sina Weibo doesn’t have an English language web interface [2]. It is only available in traditional and simplified Chinese.

Nonetheless, the language barrier hasn’t stopped these companies from using Sina Weibo, though. But much of the credit has to be given to the local agencies who are helping multinational companies to leverage Weibo for promotional campaigns, such as the one by Dove which I recently wrote about. The real-name verification regulation also doesn’t seem to affect overseas or local users just yet. It’s getting strange, as my colleague Charlie described here and here. Until now, I’m still able to weibo as usual, without having to reveal any of my personal data.

Yesterday, we took a quick first look at Sina’s enterprise weibo white paper. Enterprise weibo accounts are a big part of Sina’s push to monetize its popular social networking site — hence the fancy report — so how well they perform, and how quickly Sina can convince new businesses to sign on, is a big deal. Today, we’re diving a bit deeper into the report and taking a look at the biggest enterprise Weibo accounts.

So what companies are winning on weibo? If you take a look at the pure follower numbers, computer products for nerds (UC web browser, World of Warcraft) and shopping and sharing sites for ladies (Meilishuo, Mushroom Street, Ai Wu) dominate the list.

But anyone can buy zombies, and since these numbers were almost certainly collected before real name registration went into effect last week, what really matters is who has got the most active followers. Pinterest-y fashion sharing site Meilishuo tops that list, followed by Mushroom Street and rounded out by YinYueTai (a music platform), Weico (a weibo client), and Tmall.

It’s not a huge surprise to see so many new sites dominating this list, given that Sina’s big enterprise weibo push is also a relatively recent phenomenon. And, we’ve got to admit having nearly two million active followers is pretty impressive. Although that big gap between Meilishuo’s active and total follower counts sure makes it look like they might have bought some zombies. Just sayin’.

This chart, which we’ve translated from the report linked above, shows Sina’s breakdown of enterprise accounts by industry category. As you can see, the restaurants and dining category is way out ahead of every other industry, with nearly 50,000 registered accounts.

Click for full size.

The report says that the average enterprise weibo account has 5,000 followers and 56 percent of Sina Weibo users follow at least one enterprise account. That second number actually sounds a bit low — if I were a business owner I wouldn’t be too excited about it — but that’s just of total registered users, perhaps the percentage of active users following enterprise accounts is higher. Since Sina didn’t specifically state that, it seems pretty unlikely (companies don’t usually hide good news) but hey, uh, you never know.

Back in December everyone’s favorite reader application, Flipboard for iPad, made its way into China by partnering with Chinese internet giants Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Renren. And today Flipboard is announcing that its app is expanding to both the iPhone and iPod touch in China.

In addition, the Flipboard team is also making content from Chinese social networks, namely the afore-mentioned Sina Weibo and Renren, available to readers all over the world, not just those in China. Users just need to navigate to ‘Accounts,’ and select Sina or Renren from the many social sources listed (see here).

There is even more recommended Chinese language content available if you look down to the ‘Choose your content guide’ option near the bottom (see here), where users can now select a Chinese content guide. This area includes articles from famous publishers like GQ, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan China. For those who prefer video, there’s even a Youku section added.

I find it pleasantly surprising that Flipboard is doing so much for its Chinese-speaking users. If you’d like to try out these new features you can download the Chinese version of Flipboard for iPhone or iPad over on the App Store, or you can simply add Chinese content sources from other language versions as well.

Chinese content guide

Youku on Flipboard

Things are getting weird.

As the realities of real-name regulation on Sina Weibo begin to set in, we thought we’d check in with an update to yesterday’s post about some of the very bizarre things that are happening. Specifically, we reported that some users on Weibo — including your humble correspondent — were finding themselves real-name registered automatically, despite having taken no action and submitting no data to Sina.

Today, that hasn’t changed — I can still post, and my account information is as blank as it’s always been — but two new oddities have pooped up onto our radar. First, it appears that users with unregistered accounts that have been blocked from posting can still make posts and retweet other posts as long as they use a smartphone or tablet client. Based on our tests, it does not appear that Sina is getting any ID information from these mobile clients, as users with unregistered SIM cards (purchased before the real-name requirement for phones) and unregistered weibo accounts were still able to post.

The other interesting change is that Sina has begun blocking searches for any terms related to the real name rules. “Real-name system,” “weibo real-name system,” “real name,” and more are all blocked, and displaying the standard error message:

In accordance with the relevant laws and regulations, your search results cannot be shown.

According to some users, messages containing those phrases are also being deleted manually by Sina’s censors. We were unable to confirm this independently, and a message I posted this afternoon containing the phrase “real-name registration” remains on my account at present. However, that doesn’t mean that other users haven’t been having posts deleted.

Yesterday, we noted numerous users complaining that spam had actually increased since the regulations went into effect, so it could be that Sina is trying to keep a handle on those complaints by silencing them, or it could be that something else entirely is going on.

It’s still far too early to tell what effect the registration requirement has had on user activity, but the registration counter on Sina’s real-name registration page seems to have broken, or perhaps been turned off intentionally. When we last checked, it showed that just over 19 million users had registered, or about six percent of Sina’s total registered user base. But it’s unclear what the number is now or why Sina is no longer displaying it publicly.

We’ve been talking about real-name registration for microblogs in China for some time now, and today that day might finally be here. But has the real name regulation actually stopped anyone from posting? It doesn’t look like it.

This morning, I noticed my own Sina Weibo account had this message from Sina:

Hello, because you’re a user who filled out your identification information, we’ve already implemented real-name registration, and you can continue to use your microblog as usual. Thank you for supporting Sina.

This was quite a surprise to me, since I never filled out any identification information whatsoever. I’ve been very careful about not giving Sina anything, not even a phone number, because I don’t trust them and because I’ve wanted to test how this real name system would work. If Sina knows who I am, it’s not because of any information I gave them. And yet, here I am, registered. Bizarre.

I hopped on Twitter and Weibo to see what other people were reporting and found a number of other users reporting the same thing. Here are some posts from Weibo users about it:

榛子壳Renky:

I’m not a verified user, but I got [a message] saying real-name identity confirmed. It also told me to keep using weibo…the world is really crazy.

当锄和遇上当午:

[...] I don’t think I ever submitted any information [to Sina], but I’ve been registered. Depressing.

沐沐Maggie:

Hah, I just realized I’ve already been real-name registered [by Sina]

馮聖senck:

My weibo has been real-name registered! Wha!? It’s like being imprisoned.

On Twitter, weibo users are reporting all kinds of things. Some had the same experience as me, others have had gotten different messages or no messages at all, but the net result is that no one is complaining their weibo has been totally unable to post. There are some references to this on weibo itself, but it’s not really clear how many, if any, users have actually been restricted from posting.

It’s possible that some of the weibo users saying they’ve “been registered [by someone else]” have simply forgotten that they’ve connected a cell phone number to their account. But I am completely positive I never bound a cell phone to my account or submitted ID information to Sina, and double-checking my account settings confirms that Sina doesn’t have this information. So what they heck is going on? I’m not at all sure.

As an interesting side note, I also noticed many weibo users are complaining about increased spam since the real-name rule went into effect — or seems to have gone into effect — last night. That’s the exact opposite of the effect the real-name regulation was supposed to have, but it could just be a temporary bug.

In fact, this whole thing could just be a temporary bug. It’s still not clear at all what exactly is going on here; needless to say, it’s something we’ll be following closely.

China’s top microblog services, such as Sina Weibo, are just two days away from enacting new ‘real name’ regulations that will effectively block users from tweeting/posting if they haven’t submitted their name and ID number to the web company. And so Sina Weibo is pushing a more simplified way of just linking one’s Weibo account to one’s phone, using SMS, without specifically typing out your name and ID number.

But since Chinese phone SIM cards should, legally, only be sold when accompanied by your name and ID, it’s likely that the SMS verification method now on Sina Weibo will make a database check. That can be cheated, though; more on that later.

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has put up a special ‘real name’ page (pictured up top) for this registration as the deadline looms. The lady in the image is holding a sign saying “Get the weibo identification badge. We are all reliable people!” It makes no mention of this being a new legal requirement on Chinese microblogs. The page has two main options – note the green buttons – for an SMS-based verification, or a manual input of your details. The phone-based method is of course faster, and I was able to do the whole thing in literally less than a minute by just sending a code to the Sina mobile number. Not being a Chinese national was clearly no problem with this method. Others have reported that the manual input will fail for foreigners (as pictured here) as it will only accept Chinese text in the website’s name entry box.

After linking my Weibo account to my phone, I was given a virtual badge (pictured above) that could be retweeted.

We then experimented using a very old SIM card belonging to my colleague that was bought before the SIM card real ID law was put into force back in 2010, and so was not linked to a real name. And, lo and behold, Sina Weibo rejected the number with a stony silence and no confirmation SMS. So it seems that Sina Weibo is indeed doing a national database check. My own new SIM card, in contrast, is linked to my name and passport number.

Of course, this simpler SMS verification method is not infallible, and could be cheated by purchasing a SIM card using fake ID credentials. That way, Sina would have a name on file, but it would not be that person’s real name. We didn’t attempt to do so, but it’s certainly something that could be done.

The Sina Weibo ‘real name’ homepage features a counter showing how many people have registered their real identities in this way. It currently stands at 18.69 million, and is rising at the rate of about 20,000 people per hour. It’s not clear precisely what that tally is counting. Being such a low number – compared to the 250 million registered on Sina Weibo – it’s presumably limited only to those who’ve taken advantage of this new page, and not people who have submitted their real IDs earlier in some other way. Also note that new users have been signing-up with their real names since January 1st, so this affects only current users who’ll need to submit the info or else face being blocked from posting later this week.

Previously, Sina’s Liu Qi told Reuters that the company reckons some 60 percent of users of its Weibo service will have registered their real identities by the deadline, but no concrete numbers on the conversion progress were given. To be frank, that sounds very optimistic given the number of inactive users – and zombies and microblog spammers – that are inherent in such a social network.

China’s four major microblogs, then, are facing being cut down to size, and user numbers to be revealed later this year will show us precisely how drastic the loss of users was. Less than half, perhaps? Sina Weibo’s SMS verification method shows us that the microblogs desperately need to make it as easy as possible – even if that means the system can be cheated.

DeNA onstage at Net Impact in Jakarta.

CyberAgent Ventures Indonesia held its Net Impact Conference less than a week ago in the Grand Hyatt hotel, Jakarta. It is CyberAgent Ventures’ initiative to help improve the local startup ecosystem and to share knowledge between successful foreign companies and Indonesian entrepreneurs.

Big names from Japan such as DeNA, GREE, and of course CyberAgent itself were present, while Vietnamese companies such as NCT, Teamobi, and VNG were also there – since CyberAgent Ventures has a big presence in that country. What was different about this event was that Tencent and Sina, two of China’s biggest social media companies, were speaking for the first time in Jakarta.

Some key takeaways:

DeNA has a $5 billion market this year which is very high growth. It took only four years to do that. Top 20 titles from Mobage, the DeNA platform, see $1 million per month in sales. The company aims to boost its platform by focusing on certain regions, like China. Yesterday it recruited Sina Weibo as a distribution and login partner on its Mobage platform.

GREE is pushing its Gree Global Platform (GGP), which is the culmination of last year’s OpenFeint acquisition. The new platform puts its social games, mobile social games, and social networking service on one platform across multiple devices. It has partners in China and Korea, as well as game developers like Ubisoft and Gameloft, to name just a few.

With 190 million users in more than 100 countries, GREE aims to formally launch the GGP in April or May of this year. The company also shared some know-how at the Jakarta event, such as how it bases every decision on raw data, and how it updates games every week (day or even night, since these are online games not console-based ones). It also aims to spread profitable game-building know-how over the years as it grows; it currently has 1,200 employees and more than 12,000 global developers.

Tencent is an all-round internet giant in China: it has news, email, a search engine, online games, QQ browser, and the QQ IM which is being used by 380 million folks across all major platforms. Tencent also has its eye on Indonesia with an aim to get people onto its Qute (a group messaging app for feature-phones that’s said to be better than WhatsApp or Blackberry Messenger), and also its QQ Browser for mobile.

Sina onstage at Net Impact in Jakarta. Click to enlarge.

Sina might have gotten lucky with its Weibo service, which started as a simple Twitter clone, but it’s definitely not just a regular clone. Grwoing to about 300 million registered users in just two years, it now encompasses online browser games, a virtual currency, online storage, brand pages, charity pages, online polling, and so much more. Sina representatives in Jakarta revealed they will have a $200 million developers fund, enhanced Weibo for enterprise, and a plan to build an online payment platform as well (as its virtual currency is now tied to third-party solutions).

Vietnam’s NCT shared about how it started as a music website and then evolved into a platform where you can find services like matchmaking, e-commerce, social networking, or even online payment. VNG is also doing what all the major social games companies are doing – making itself into a social games platform.

Net Impact was definitely one of the best conferences in Jakarta yet (I’m stressing that last word), but it definitely was not perfect either. Most of the keynotes felt like they were hard sells for the company, whereas what I think we need is to learn how we, as Indonesian entrepreneurs, can take in their experience and build our own success stories. Still, props to the CyberAgent Ventures team for holding this Net Impact Conference.