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)

We’ve written much in the past about how individuals and organizations outside of China are making use of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo microblogging platform in order to reach Chinese speaking netizens. Whether it’s famous celebrities (see Tom Cruise, Emma Watson, Brad Pitt) or politicians (from Australia, England, Japan) or brands — Weibo appears to be the medium of choice.

College recruiting appears to be the latest use for Weibo, as Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering recently held a group chat on its Sina Weibo page in order to answer questions from prospective students for its graduate program.

In total, there were 150 participants, with 80 questions posted in the short span of an hour. Graduates and current students in the program were also available to answer questions. You can get an idea of the type of inquiries that were asked here.

Duke is also active on Renren as well, giving it a pretty progressive Chinese social media strategy.

While it’s no surprise that more and more schools are enlisting the help of social media tools in recruiting these days, it’s interesting to see U.S. schools go so far as to join Chinese platforms to recruit Chinese students. I wonder how active most Chinese universities are in comparison, assuming they are active at all?

On a somewhat related note, we recently wrote about India’s top business school, IIM-A, which partnered with LinkedIn to help connect students to recruiters.

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 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.

Sina Weibo is not making money. Not yet at least. But it may have found a way to do so, as we saw from last week’s Weibo social commerce test with Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. The manufacturer offered 50,000 MI2 phones to Weibo users, which they could order through tweeting. Payments are all done within Sina Weibo.

The result was staggering, with 1.3 million reservations made for those phones in just over five minutes. That was pretty shocking, and I chose it to be my pick for the top news story of last week. As I noted then, we have to give credit to Sina Weibo as a platform as it enabled Xiaomi to capitalize on such high demand. If Xiaomi could to fulfill each request, that would have meant $416 million!

I can’t help but feel that this is something that Twitter could try too. In fact Twitter has already tested something like this with its @EarlyBird experiment. That turned out to be a flop.

But the mechanism is different. @EarlyBird helped brands tweet out deals, but that’s about it. In contrast the Xiaomi-Weibo experiment last week was led and spread by Xiaomi. Folks who made a reservation also had to tweet their orders. And the result of this brand and fan push was a viral one.

Another key difference between Weibo and Twitter’s @EarlyBird is that payment is made through Weibo credits, thus providing a seamless process of ordering and paying for a Xiaomi MI2 entirely on Weibo.

I’m not sure if Sina Weibo will open this up for all brands, but given this Xiaomi success, my guess is that it probably will.

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]

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!

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.

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]

After acquiring millions of users, perhaps it’s time for some monetization. That’s the case with the team behind TuDing, one of China’s biggest Instagram-like photo-sharing apps, which has recently started to play host to brands as part of their social media marketing campaigns. The three biggest to have partnered with TuDing so far are Starbucks, Nike, and North Face.

The two sportswear makers have a pretty unique thing to show for their marketing – a custom photo-filter within the app. It seems to be paying off for North Face, climbing beyond 100,000 followers in the photo-sharing service, which has a total of more than five million users. That’s growing well from the four million we reported last December. Starbucks, meanwhile, has just signed up as a regular user, and doesn’t have so many followers to show for it.

It marks TuDing’s growth to the level at which it can be a destination for brands. Aside from the hundreds of millions of people on Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Renren (NYSE:RENN), Tuding is more like the check-in social network Jiepang in being a niche app where certain leisure brands can connect with a well-heeled, smartphone-owning, and receptive audience. That’s why Jiepang has partnered with Starbucks for two years already, and has run some interesting campaigns with the likes of Louis Vuitton.

An infographic in Chinese (see it here) made earlier this year suggests that 58 percent of TuDing’s users are women, so some female-oriented brands are perhaps missing out there. Of that five million user-ship, 33 percent are using the iPhone app, and 26 percent are on Android. As a whole, 48 percent of its users are synced up to Sina Weibo, firing off their photos to the nation via the country’s biggest Twitter-esque site.

Snag the Tuding app for Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or Symbian S60 from its homepage.

Reports in Japanese and Chinese media are saying that the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office will soon be making use of the popular Sina Weibo microblog service as a means of reaching out to the public in China.

Previously, the Prime Minister’s Office has made use of Twitter and Facebook to reach out to English speaking audiences after last years earthquake. The PMO’s office also has a Youtube channel, but that’s hasn’t been getting very much attention.

This comes at a time when Sino-Japanese relations are strained, most notably with regards to the disputed Senkaku Islands [1]. So opening a channel of communication like this is welcome news, although it remains to be seen exactly how that channel will be used. We reached out to a representative at the Prime Minister’s office this morning to find out more about this plan, and we’ll let you know if we receive any reply.

Update 15:05, 07/26: We managed to speak with Noriyuki Shikata, the deputy cabinet secretary for public affairs and director of global communications at the Prime Minister’s Office. He further informs us that the PMO has been working on reaching out to Chinese audiences for some time now, as it already has a Chinese version of the PMO’s website as of this past February, and many speeches, press conferences transcripts, and blog entries are already being published in Chinese. Just as the PMO’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been used as a dissemination tool for these messages, likewise Sina Weibo will serve the same purpose.

As for more engaging conversation, Mr. Shikata has been using Weibo himself for about half a year (see his profile here) and uses it a little more freely and informally. He was quite active conversing with English speakers after the March earthquake last year. He also noted that the Japanese Embassy in Beijing is on Weibo, as is the JNTO.

Update 15:09: I just stumbled across the URL for the Prime Minister’s Office on Weibo. While it has not officially launched yet, there is a since message posted as a greeting, which I have roughly translated:

To our Chinese friends, hello! The Japanese Prime Minister’s Office has opened a pilot Sina microblog. We will soon officially begin. We hope it can become a window through which our Chinese friends can come to understand information from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Last year Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) partnered with a Japanese company, Find Japan, which acts as a verification service provider for Japan-based companies and individuals who want to reach Chinese audiences.

This is not the first time that we have seen foreign politicians taking to China’s most famous microblogging site to reach Chinese audiences. Politicians from Victoria, Australia, Ted Baillieu and Daniel Andrews jumped on Weibo back in March to woo Chinese-speaking Victorian residents. Likewise former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who actually speaks Chinese, joined Weibo in April. In contrast to their efforts, London mayor Boris Johnson stumbled in his initial Weibo efforts, and has not been very active of late.

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]

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-admits-real-name-not-implemented-weibo/ http://www.techinasia.com/sina-admits-real-name-not-implemented-weibo/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:00:29 +0000 Steven Millward http://www.techinasia.com/?p=76671 Read more »]]>

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.

Social data platform Gnip says its data is already being used by 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies to monitor social data from assorted services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and many more. Today the Colorado-based company is announcing that it will be adding Chinese microblog Sina Weibo to that list.

This means that data from the Weibo API will be included in Gnip’s Enterprise Data Collector, and will feature things like URL expansion, format normalization, and duplicate exclusion.

I had a chance to speak with the company’s COO and president, Chris Moody, today via telephone. I was to curious to learn a little bit more about why Gnip wanted to expand to specifically to Sina Weibo. He explained:

The plan to bring this source of data to market now is really driven 100 percent by our customer base. Our customers are usually enterprise level providers who take our data, do the analysis and insights and then pass it on to brands… This particular source rose to the top of the list as being an in-demand source; a very specific brand ‘ask.’ And I think we don’t completely understand what’s driving that yet, but 30 percent of our client base is international, and even domestically many clients are representing international brands that are very interested in the worldwide conversation about their brand, and not just the US and European discussions.

I was curious about whether or not there was a language barrier to this kind of business, and Chris explained that there is. But thankfully for Gnip, it’s a problem that usually their clients who are requesting data about conversation in specific languages, and are prepared to handle those.

I also asked Chris how working with Sina Weibo metrics might differ from dealing with data from its western microblog cousin, Twitter:

One thing we can definitely observe is that there’s a high volume of data, and our customers are certainly interested in high-volume data sets. Just the sheer volume makes it an intriguing source. What can you derive from this conversation aside from Twitter? Obviously it’s a very different audience so you’re hearing from a different segment of the population. It will be interesting to see what our customers derive from this.

Does Gnip plan to expand to more Chinese services in the future? While Chris couldn’t name specifics, he did note that Gnip “plans to have broader coverage in China.” He notes that there are different conversations taking place on different networks, and that the idea that one social network could cover the entire conversation is “not realistic.”

As we mentioned a couple of weeks back, there are over 1000 Sina Weibo enterprise accounts for overseas. That’s certainly one sign that companies want to engage in conversation with Chinese users. “The appetite for more and more diversity in terms of conversation is growing,” says Chris.

Big data is proving to be big business, and Gnip certainly looks to be capitalizing on that. Their clients are demanding more diverse conversation, and for them to be able to provide this will certainly help in finding insight into what China is saying online.

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]

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]

A couple of days ago we told you about how some businesses outside of China are taking advantage of the Sina Weibo platform to reach Chinese consumers. And today there’s a report from Australia’s The Age explaining how both Victorian premier Ted Baillieu and opposition leader Daniel Andrews have taken to Weibo to reach Chinese speaking Victorians.

Having just opened the account on Monday, Baillieu himself has almost 25,000 followers so far, having posted only four updates, all in Chinese. His account sports a “V” for verified, and his advisor Gladys Liu has her email listed on his page for anyone who wants to correspond.

It’s pretty interesting that an overseas politician would take to Weibo to engage with Chinese people in his area. Perhaps we’ll see more of this in areas of the world which have high Chinese populations.

We’ve seen some creative use of social media in politics over the past few years, with Facebook playing a big role in last year’s general election in Singapore as just one example. Of course, the United States will see a presidential election this year as well. Might we see Barack Obama on Weibo reaching out to Chinese voters? Ok, perhaps not. But we can always hope.

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]

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.

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

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.

Continuing its recruitment drive of China Mobage partners, Japanese social gaming giant DeNA (TYO:2432) just announced what may very well be its biggest partnership in the country to date. The company has struck an agreement with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), a social giant in its own right, and the operator of the popular Sina Weibo microblogging platform.

For DeNA, the deal means that Mobage China will be more accessible to Weibo users, who currently number over 300 million. It also means that come this April, Sina will establish a new Mobage website under its domain where users can download gaming apps to their Android phones.

As with its recent partnership with Qihoo 360 in China, users can login to Mobage China with their existing Weibo IDs and passwords.

Of course, Sina Weibo has its own games platform (at game.weibo.com), and is apparently doing quite well with it. Ostensibly Sina didn’t see any clash between its own platform and the mobile-based Mobage platform, and it will be interesting to see if that’s indeed the case.

Since Mobage China launched last year, DeNA has also partnered with a wide assortment of Chinese internet and mobile entities, including Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba Cloud Computing, social network Kaixin001, and online game developer NetDragon.

Starting this morning, Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) is adding search results from Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, giving its search engine users quick access to tweets on trending topics.

The very recent tweets will show in a box clearly marked ‘newest weibo results’ on the first page of a Baidu search for any names or phrases that happen to be popular/trending [1] at the time. For example, if I search for ‘Windows 8’ in Chinese, I get three relevant Weibo tweets (as pictured above).

As is inevitable when linking to random microbloggers, the results can be a mixed bag, so only one of the tweets proved useful in my test, taking me to a video news report about the Windows 8 launch. One way for Baidu to improve this is by taking you to the actual tweet page, not the Weibo user’s homepage (as currently occurs). Also, it would be useful to scroll through some more microblog results, as can be done with Google’s collated Twitter search results.

This initiative by Baidu isn’t entirely new, as the search engine giant has already tied up with three other microblog sites in China: Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weibo, plus the less used Netease (NASDAQ:NTES) and Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU) Weibo platforms as well. So, today the picture is complete with added support for the Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) service. Even though Tencent’s site has more registered users – a whopping 300 million – today’s addition is important because Sina’s service seems to have the most buzz, more media mentions, and allegedly also has the lion’s share of wealthier urban users.

Announcing the new Sina Weibo searches, Baidu’s executive assistant, Zhang Dong-cheng, said:

We process billions of search queries on a daily basis, and many of those queries are related to the real-time information found on microblog posts. With this deal between Baidu and Sina Weibo, Baidu has completed its integration of high-quality content from China’s four leading microblog platforms.

In the same joint Sina-Baidu press release, Sina’s VP, Peng Shao-bin, said that his company’s Weibo service sees “100 million microblog posts daily” and can thereby provide “quality real-time information.”

Exactly two weeks from today, all microblog sites must start to enforce ‘real name’ tweeting, meaning that any users who have not submitted their names and national ID numbers to the web companies will no longer be able to post. That could cause the number of daily microblog posts to fall off a cliff.

Weibo mascots on a break, GMIC 2011

No longer does the V-for-Verified logo on a Sina Weibo blogger’s site indicate that they are the person they say they are and not an impostor. To a degree, anyone can have his or her Weibo account verified by paying some money on Taobao.com, ranging from 10 to 600 RMB.

Originally, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) verified Weibo accounts were essentially the same as Twitter’s, displaying a ‘verified’ badge to make it easy for the public to recognize an account (mostly public figures who have a certain popularity or reputation) is the real thing. According to china.com, the previous verification process by Sina was strict and complex. Applicants should have popularity in fields such as entertainment, sports, media, politics, etc, and they also need to hand over identification and a certificate from their employers to keep on file.

For some reason, the verified accounts seem to gather followers much easier and they command a higher degree of trust from the public on Weibo. Their tweets get more comments and retweets, their opinion and recommendations initiate responses and approval. So it’s little wonder more and more bloggers on Weibo want to get a “verified badge”.

Search for ADD V on Taobao

Perhaps this is why the trade on Taobao.com is so prosperous. Most online sellers promise to deliver a verified account within 24 hours after payment. And it seems they really do come through according to the praise and feedback given by buyers. Another frequently-used shortcut to get verified is with the help of Weibo insiders — if you happen to know one — who has the right to modify accounts.

If it is only for chasing vanity, then abused verifications are of little harm. However, ‘fake’ verified accounts could also be used for misleading marketing, or worse. Regardless, there seems to be no stopping them: fake verified accounts on Weibo have developed into an interesting micro-economy.

[Via china.com]

This morning, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) quarterly earnings call turned more than a few heads. The company actually posted a profit, but is forecasting a less pleasant Q1 2012 thanks to the approaching real-name registration deadline as well as some additional investments in the weibo platform. CEO Charles Chao said of the impending deadline:

We believe the requirement to convert existing users into verified users [...] will have a negative impact on user activity in the short term.

He did announce some good news, too — Sina Weibo has broken the 300 million user mark — but judging from the comments on Twitter this morning, most people seemed to feel that Mr. Chao sounded downbeat.

For a great summary of the whole thing, read through Digicha’s post with a rundown of @niubi’s tweets throughout the call, but here are a couple really significant ones:

$SINA CEO predicts 10-20% of new users may drop out real name registration process. then 40-45% of those who try will fail verification

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) February 28, 2012

$SINA CEO: initial response rate 2 trying get existing users 2 upgrade 2 real name has been “quite low”. lots of “uncertainty” & “hopefully”

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) February 28, 2012

interesting $sina will now focus disclosure on active user %. that #likely go up as real name kills off spam/inactive accounts. spinnable

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) February 28, 2012

That last point is especially significant, as it seems to indicate that Sina expects the actual number of active users to drop significantly. It also sounds like the site may not hit the March 16th deadline for forcing existing users to register or get out, but real-name is coming sooner or later, and clearly Sina expects to take a big hit on overall active user numbers. Active user percentage is the only statistic that’s likely to go up since whatever else the real-name requirement does, it is likely to cut down significantly on fake accounts.

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether or not foreigners will be able to use the service at all after the cutoff. I have heard from a few people that they’ve been granted the “V” verification just in the past few days, and anyone who has that is good to go. But my own account remains unverified, and an attempt to register my real name earlier today resulted in a double failure: Sina’s system wouldn’t accept my passport number or my crazy foreigner name.

Of course, not having many foreigners is very unlikely to impact Sina’s bottom line. But it could be a significant annoyance for foreign businesses looking to market to the Chinese internet community, not to mention entrepreneurs and other foreign users who want to be able to interact with Chinese users via social media.

In any event, we’re keeping an eye on Weibo and activity levels there as the March 16 deadline approaches (assuming Sina hits it). The conversion numbers certainly don’t look good, but we won’t know for sure how things are going to look until it’s happening.

Is there really a weipocalyse coming, or am I blowing things out of proportion? Place your bets in the comments.

[Image background source]

Chao also emphasized that multimedia will be important for weibo going forward, as more video and audio content is shared on the social media service.

What Chao didn’t mention, unsurprisingly, is that Sina Weibo is fast approaching the March 16th deadline for real-name user registration. New user numbers have been way down since January when the service began requiring real-name registration for new users, and active user numbers are expected to fall off a cliff when the restriction goes into effect for all users on March 16.

Sina has been tight-lipped about the impending weipocalypse, but Chao’s emphasis on business and marketing accounts at yesterday’s forum in Taipai may be one kind of coping strategy, as businesses almost always register real-name accounts to prevent fake/imitation accounts from popping up. Of course, Weibo will be a far less useful marketing channel for companies after its user numbers decline — and they almost certainly will decline, steeply — but we suppose it could always be useful as a B2B marketing channel.

But we’ll have to wait until next month to see what Weibo really looks like after the real-name requirement goes into effect. Personally I think it’s going to be bad — and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences agrees with me — but only time will tell.

[Via Sina Tech (the image, too)]

The Chinese web portal Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has confirmed that in February 2012 it will spin-off its product and real-estate search engine, Yiqisoo, and then invest in it.

The input of cash will reportedly total 10 million RMB (US$1.58 million), and coincide with the site focusing only on home electronics and personal gadgets, which are termed ‘3C’ items.

2012 looks set to see a product search engine war, as Alibaba’s Etao – which has proved controversial this year – faces off against Netease’s (NASDAQ:NTES) planned spin-off from Youdao.com, which will also focus on just 3C. And Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) might need to zero in on this area if its growing market share is not going to dip all of a sudden.

But with Alibaba having announced it’ll spend one billion RMB on marketing Etao, Sina’s sum to be spent on pivoting Yiqisoo looks rather small.

Sina’s Cui Xing-long took the opportunity of the announcement to put some voodoo on Etao, saying that a product search engine that’s independent from any e-commerce site – like Yiqisoo will become – is a safer bet for consumers. Netease will likely use the same argument when its own effort launches next year as well.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has added some location-based services (LBS) to the mobile apps for its microblogging platform, Weibo. A new update to both its Android and iOS apps allows users to search for nearby users or tweets, and puts a familiar pin logo in the top toolbar above your timeline.

This could cause a backlash from some users who might not want to be located so easily. The updated Weibo apps seem to be able to position people to within a few hundred meters – even those who have not geo-tagged their posts. And so the official Weibo mobile app seems to be discerning where users are using GPS – and where their tweets were posted – without very specifically okaying this with people. I have inputted my city of residence in my profile – as have many people – but the app is now showing me people who live and work on my street. And most users likely don’t even realise.

The updated Weibo app for iOS now has a ‘nearby tweets’ and ‘nearby people’ feature within the ‘discover’ section of the app, while the Android version seems to only have the latter function:

Sina already has its Weilingdi LBS app – made by Finnish location-services experts GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V) – which is a separate download. But this week Sina seems to be integrating much of those location-specific aspects into the regular Weibo mobile apps. And so Weilingdi is now pretty much obsolete now that microbloggers can ‘check in’ to a venue in the plain Weibo app.

There are third-party apps for Weibo which make a better choice in terms of aesthetics than Sina’s, but it seems that whichever app you use to post from, you’re tied-in to these new features.

We’ve reached out to Sina HQ for comments on this issue, and will update if we hear back.

Let us know in the comments if you think this is a privacy concern, feature bloat – or a useful new feature.

[Hat-tip to 36kr for spotting this new feature]

Sina headquarters in Beijing

Guest author Julia Q. Zhu is a leading expert on international e-commerce in China and the Asia Pacific region. She formerly held multiple management positions for Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company. Prior to Alibaba, Julia worked for iResearch in Beijing, China’s equivalent to ComScore. Follow Julia on Twitter @juliaqzhu.

On December 16, the Beijing Internet Information Department issued a new set of regulations titled the “Beijing Microblog Development Management Regulations.” The regulations require new users of microblog services to register with their valid personal identification details prior to gaining access to the site. Should a new user fail to enter this information, he or she will only be able to view microblog posts, but not create their own. According to official statements, microblog operators like Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent (HKG:0700) will have to implement the changes within the next three months.

Are the new regulations bad for China’s micro-blogosphere?

Many Internet analysts view the new regulations in a negative light. They feel that as a result of the new regulations, the number of microbloggers in China will decrease substantially. These analysts also contend that netizens will not be as willing to share information freely on microblog sites, now that their comments can be traced directly to their true self. While there is some degree of truth in their argument, the regulations are not all bad.

Take for example, the following online poll in which 1,248 Chinese netizens participated:

Chinese netizens are surprisingly much more optimistic and supportive of the regulations according to the survey. Of the 1,248 respondents, half of them believe that the policy could help foster a healthier microblogging environment, and reduce false claims and slander on microblogging platforms. Only 25.8 percent of respondents selected they will stop using microblog sites as a result of the regulations. 

It’s true that some Chinese microbloggers may have concerns about microblogging under the government’s supervision. But on the other hand, if Chinese netizens do freely express their opinions and criticisms about society and under the government’s supervision, it may demonstrate their commitment to free speech online and help foster a sense of social responsibility among their fellow netizens. 


Another benefit will likely be a reduction in micro-marketing companies who use fake “Da Hao Weibo Accounts” (aka zombie accounts) to accomplish marketing microblogging campaigns for their clients. These companies will undoubtedly crumble as they will no longer be able to create thousands of fake “follower” accounts. In this regard, the policy actually helps create a more transparent microblogosphere and forces marketers to adopt innovative practices to attract new followers rather than relying on deceptive business practices. 


According to this past June’s China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) data, the number of microbloggers in China reached 195 million – an increase of 208.9 percent in the last six months. The massive explosion of microblogging has forced the Chinese government to take real action as it continues its ongoing efforts to monitor and manage sensitive content on the Chinese web. We will have to see what impact the new regulations have on Chinese microblogs over the coming months; however, I assure you not all of the results will be bad.

Sina weibo yearly retrospective

As the year draws to a close, people are beginning the retrospectives and looks back that will soon cover the entire internet like a big, boring blanket. Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) is one of the first players to enter this game, with a big retrospective feature on what happened on Weibo over the past year. If you’re a Weibo nerd and you can read Chinese, the whole thing is worth checking out, but for now we’ll stick to the most important part, which is the list Sina made of the ten biggest topics on Weibo this year.

The list is as follows. It’s not numbered on Sina’s feature, so we’re not sure whether there’s a significance to the order or not, but we’re presenting it in the same order Sina did just in case.

• 7/23 high speed rail accident
• Tennis player Li Na wins French Open
• Weibo anti-child-trafficking campaign
• Japan earthquake
• Guo Meimei Incident
• Steve Jobs’ passing
• Xie Na and Zhang Jie’s marriage
• Little Yueyue makes people rethink being uncaring
• Death of Bin Laden
• Broadcast of Bu Bu Jing Xin [a popular TV series]

Having been watching Weibo fairly carefully over the past year, I think it’s a pretty fair list, and I’m especially glad to see they didn’t try to shy away from how big the July train crash got on Weibo.

The reason I thought they might do that was that there are increasing whispers about Sina cracking down on political discussion on Weibo. For example, the Financial Times wrote (h/t to Digicha):

Many heavy users of Sina ($SINA) Weibo, the country’s leading Twitter substitute, told the Financial Times that they felt that the microblog had become less vibrant as new controls were introduced over the last few months.

“Sina is cracking down hard,” says Xie Wen, a prominent internet entrepreneur and prolific microblogger. He notes that posts which would have attracted large numbers of re-tweets and comments before the new restrictions are now barely making any impact, a complaint echoed by many other prominent microbloggers.

There’s no real data to prove or disprove this, but anecdotally, I have found it to be true as well, as several Weibo posts I’ve made in recent weeks have been deleted very quickly.

From a business perspective, a crackdown on political discussion on Sina Weibo could result in decreased user interest that hurts the site. Then again, government officials have made repeated statements over the fall about how microblogging needs to be properly managed; not cracking down could be just as dangerous since every Chinese internet company succeeds only to the extent the government allows it to.

Moreover, a politically “castrated” weibo might still work for Sina. Bill Bishop of the invaluable Digicha writes:

As for the risks of castration, emasculation has sometimes been a path to riches in China. More than a few eunuchs have amassed great power and huge fortunes. A neutered Weibo could still be a successful business.

Will anything as controversial as the high-speed rail accident appear on next year’s top ten list? My gut feeling says no. That might not mean Sina’s facing any sort of financial losses, but it would be a significant loss for China and its people, so I really hope I’m wrong.

Twitter’s slick new redesign has brought it – visually and practically – closer to China’s most dynamic microblogging platform, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo. It shows, perhaps, that Sina’s rapid rate of change on its most popular service is now actually leading the way for Twitter. How the tables have turned!

More seriously, though, the two companies have a very different philosophy, so we won’t engage in the kind of “copycat” name-calling that we usually discourage. Whereas Twitter has been evolving very slowly, and espouses “simplicity,” Sina has been throwing major new features at its Weibo platform – such as social gaming accompanied by a virtual currency – in an aggressive land-grab approach that’s more typical on the Chinese web where it’s necessary to seize users before a rival does pretty much the same thing.

And so, inevitably, the fast-changing Sina Weibo service – which is up against Tencent’s (HKG:0700) microblogging site that has the same generic ‘weibo’ name – is already doing some things that can be seen in Twitter’s latest redesign this week. And that’s no bad thing. Here are five key areas where it has grown more like Weibo (all five images can be clicked to enlarge):

Customized Brand Pages

Twitter’s brand pages get the same nice redesign as all users get, and seem to have only one differentiation in terms of layout: the option to customize the long rectangle above the tweets (see the area showing the sea of sugary soda in the picture below). Weibo’s brand pages have a vastly different look to those of regular users, allowing them to embed a corporate video at the top, and lots of other tweaks. It’ll be interesting to see if Twitter relents and permits more customizations in future for its branded pages:

Embedded Videos, Photos, and GIFs

Twitter now has much better support for embedding images in the site, obviating the need for so much clicking away. Of course, a lot of third-party Twitter apps have been doing this for some time, which is why a lot of Twitter’s core users prefer desktop or web apps – such as Tweetdeck, or Echofon – to the Twitter.com page.

Weibo, meanwhile, has had these baked-in videos and images er… baked-in since its roll-out last year:

Photo Albums

…And all those photos and GIFs will now be added into a ‘recent images’ folder on Twitter, just as Sina Weibo has been doing since a redesign earlier this summer. But Sina’s folders are more powerful, allowing you to add multiple folders, or view only your friend’s images in a highly visual stream:

Separate Page for Mentions

Twitter’s new ‘@connect’ tab finally gives all your important mentions the separate space they deserve, just like Weibo’s area for all your comments – yes, it has blog-style comment too – mentions, and retweets:

More Info in Side Panels

Finally, Twitter’s side pane now shows more information, such as suggestions as to who to follow, and some of the hottest trends. Of course, Facebook has been doing this for even longer, as part of the way it draws you in to the service:

Having said all that, I really like the redesign, and I like how it follows Twitter’s ethos whilst also adding some much-needed features.

The twitter redesign should be automatically showing-up for many people, but if not I believe you can force it to do so by downloading the updated mobile apps whilst signed-in to Twitter’s new preview page.

The inevitable rush to build an Instagram-like photo-sharing app that’s localized for China has resulted in a nice, wide variety of apps and services. But there seems to be one winner so far, with a claimed four million users – and that’s TuDing.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s a rare overseas success story, being made by GeoSentric (HEL:GEO1V), a Finnish company with a long track-record in location-based technology. It’s TuDing app – it means ‘thumbtack’ in Chinese – is one of the most well-developed, social, and cross-platform of all the local photo-sharing services, supporting sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Kaixin, Renren, and more; it has apps for iPhone, Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry. In terms of third-party logins, it allows usage via six local social media platforms.

The TuDing app for iPhone.

GeoSentric has made it an international product, too, which it markets worldwide under the TudingMe name.

A few other tidbits about TuDing: of its four million users, about 20 percent use the service in some way once a week, and they have now amassed over 6 million photos which are uploaded at the rate of five per minute. Those numbers were revealed to the local tech news site 36kr, but it’s not clear if all those users are based in China. But that doesn’t matter too much, as other Chinese social photo apps such as PhotoSola – which was acquired by Baidu last month – have been gaining users in other countries too.

The Finnish company clearly nows how to do business in China, having formed a joint-venture with Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) in June of this year to form Gypsii Shanghai (GSSH), which operates all of Sina’s location-based services such as its Weilingdi, a check-in service loosely tied to its Weibo platform

Give TuDing a try, starting by getting one of its mobile apps from its homepage.

[Source: 36kr - article in Chinese]

Photo via Flipboard blog

Earlier this year you may recall that everyone’s favorite iPad reading app Flipboard was blocked in China. But apparently the GFW ain’t no thang, as the company has made its way into China via big-name partnerships with none other than Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) and Renren (NYSE:RENN).

As Flipboard points out in a blog post:

[Y]ou can already search for and add content in any language to Flipboard. What’s different about the Chinese edition is the fact that the entire Flipboard experience is in the local language, including a curated Content Guide with regionally-relevant content and the inclusion of popular local social networks Sina Weibo and Renren.

I’m not certain what the most recent status of the regular Flipboard app is (is it still blocked?) but this is certainly good news for Chinese fans of the app. In a Wall Street Journal report this morning, Flipboard’s Robin Chan notes that “[b]y working with government-approved content from partners, we think we addressed the issue with the government.”

This Chinese version is Flipboard’s first international edition, and it’s certainly a bold step considering the app’s previous troubles. As co-founder and Chief Exec Mike McCue noted at the time, it opened the door for Flipboard clones to step in in their place (see Zaker for example):

But McCue told the WSJ that part of the reason for entering China first was because these clones created a ‘sense of urgency’ for Flipboard to develop a Chinese edition.

As for Sina, CEO Charles Chao noted that “having Sina content and publication partners available on Flipboard [provides] a new way for publications to reach readers and a new way for our Sina Weibo users to enjoy and share content.” Likewise Renren’s CEO Joseph Chen said “[our] cooperation with Flipboard will further enrich our social network experience and satisfy user demands.”

If you’d like to try the Chinese edition of Flipboard, you can get it for free via iTunes. We’ve included a few of their screenshots below, showing the same great design that made the original edition so popular.

A sweet-looking new app from a Chinese startup lets you ‘circle’ and categorize the people you follow on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, for easy grouping of your favourite ‘tweeters.’ And while it sounds great in theory, in practice I found it of limited use.

The app is called Qu Wen Qian Zi – or, literally, Interesting Circles – and is made by a startup who seems to be called either ‘Interesting,’ or perhaps 17qz; I’ll go with the latter. Its minimal UI is enticing and sexily subtle, and easy third-party sign-in via your Sina Weibo account makes for an easy start.

Choose some of your Weibo follows and put them into circles - one by freakin' one.

The Interesting Circles app (so far for Android only, but with an iPhone version in the works) then shows you a bunch of people you follow – but not, it seems, everyone; the selection appeared random – and you then need to make new circles and add people to them. I made a ‘startups’ circle, and tried to add someone, and then realised that I needed to fire them a Weibo message in order for the process to work. That sounds like a bit of a nag, but I suppose it’s an inevitable promotional move. Thankfully, though, that other person does not need to also use the service for the encircling magic to work.

...Oh, and you'll have to spam your Weibo buddies before you add them to a circle.

After giving it a try this evening, I found it far too fiddly – there’s no mass drag-and-drop function like you can do in the Google+ web app – and not worth the effort of categorizing the people I follow on Weibo. The people I most want to listen to are the ones whom I’ve already memorized, and there are inevitably people I don’t know how to categorize but that I’m following out of politeness. After adding a couple of people, I gave up the will to add more. Some people will find more utility in it, I’m sure.

The Sina Weibo web app already has a groups feature. And while it’s admittedly not so sweet-looking – and missing from the company’s official mobile app – it’s good enough for most people not to need a separate solution.

What would be much more useful in terms of a new app would be a way to build upon one’s Weibo contacts more meaningfully, such as an app that’d let me add more business-related info to some Weibo followers, and then incorporate/sync them in my contacts. As it stands, the concept of circles is great, but it’s an extra labor the way this is done.

Get the Android app direct from 17qz’s homepage.

Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has unveiled its brand-new chat/messaging mobile service called, Weiyou – aka Weibo Messenger – to the public. So far it only has an Android app; but surely an iPhone version will appear soon.

The app works similarly with other instant messaging apps, like QQ and Gtalk. But something special about Weiyou is that it is built specifically for users on Sina Weibo, China’s smash-hit microblogging platform. The messages are sort of direct/private messages between users, and supports both text and voice messages. The UI is designed to look and feel like a group messaging app (pictured below), such as Whatsapp, Miliao, or Weixin. So although it is not tied to a phone number, it effectively works more like a group-messaging app.

While some might write this off as “another messaging app clone”, I actually find this strategy pretty interesting. Think about it… For messaging apps to be successful there must be a network effect. Meaning, the app will be useless if your friends aren’t on it. (I was actually one of the first paid users on Whatsapp but didn’t really use it until some my friends are on board).

But with 250 million users, Sina Weibo already has a huge advantage over the rest. You can get a microblog and messaging service using just one Sina Weibo account. But I’m not sure why Sina didn’t want to integrate Weiyou within its official app. Perhaps Sina has doubts whether Weiyou will actually catch on.

The biggest problem is that Weiyou came to the party slightly too late. Chinese users are now very tied down to conventional IM such as QQ, or have already gotten settled into other group messaging apps like Weixin or Miliao. Nonetheless, it is surely still worth a try.

Here’s the Weiyou app for Android in the Market.

The platform, which appears to be exclusive to Beijing for the moment but which we expect will spread soon enough to Shanghai and other first-tier cities, is called the “Beijing Weibo Announcement Room” (rough translation) and collects the postings of Weibo accounts connected to many of the city’s government departments and other official organizations, from the police to the Tourism Development Committee. There are also several government spokesmen listed.

Users can check off the accounts they want to follow and then click once to follow them all at once, or just check the live stream of posts lower on the page, which is sortable into three categories: “Cultural Beijing”, “Technology and Science Beijing”, and “Green Beijing”.

It also features the music video for “Beijing Welcomes You,” which is embedded in the top right and plays automatically. This is an especially important feature, because most Beijingers have only heard this song several billion times by this point and it’s possible not everyone has memorized all the words (or the names of all the celebs in that video) yet.

So, yes, Beijing welcomes you to, uh, check out the official pronouncements of its government departments on Weibo! Because if there’s only thing the kids love more than microblogging these days, it’s reading about the newest regulatory initiatives from the Tourism Development Committee.

We’re guessing that this is, as previously mentioned, related to the official government edition of Weibo we wrote about last month, and we expect that our friends in Shanghai and other cities will get access to the same service soon enough.

Finally, since I had to hear the song again to write this report, I’m inflicting it on you all, too. Commence wholesome entertainment time!

via Translation Guy Blog

Sina Weibo is freakin’ huge. I think we’ve mentioned that before. But they’re not just big in mainland China, you know. According to a press release from Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) today, its Weibo service now has more than two million users in Hong Kong.

That’s pretty impressive given that (a) Hong Kong users have access to Western social media competitors like Twitter and Facebook and (b) the total population of Hong Kong is just above seven million. That means out of every four Hong Kongers you meet, at least one or two have a Weibo account. Also, did we mention that’s growth of over a million users since this past March? Daaaaaamn!

Now, before you get too excited, Sina’s presser says that the service has “over 600 thousand monthly unique visitors.” We checked, and that number includes those accessing from mobile apps, which means that of the two million Hong Kong users it sounds like only about one-quarter are particularly active on the service.

Still, the growth is pretty impressive! How did Sina pull it off? To hear them tell it, they did it by engaging with the local community in the local langage (which is Cantonese, not the Mandarin that is spoken in much of mainland China):

The milestone in Hong Kong comes shortly after SINA HK launched its first ever Hong Kong outdoor advertising campaign in which the brand used the word ‘Wei’ in local tone to start conversations with Hong Kong people and increased people’s association with ‘Weibo.com’.

If you’re wondering what that looks like, apparently you need look no further than the bus at the top of this post, which features one of the ads. “Wei” means “micro” (as in, microblog) in Mandarin but it’s a common way to say Hi in Cantonese, so the advertisements were a local pun of sorts.

I have to say, to the average expat, the cops here in the PRC might end up as being a little fearsome. It’s these guys who decide whether or not you’re allowed into the country, and if you’re slapped with a thousand-plus RMB fine for speeding, these guys pocket the whole thing (allegedly!). When I lost my iPhone in Shanghai, I spent a whole hour declaring the loss to the cops, who used a little bit of backward technology known as pen and paper…

So you can imagine the shock and awe when you stumble upon police that tweet – of course, on sanctioned Weibo accounts – in straight-forward people language.

Enter, then, Duan Lang, a police offer in Jiujiang, in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. Officially known as Duan Xingyan, this cop doesn’t appear to be the average cop with official-speak coming out his mouth. Apart from his “average policeman” photo with the ubiquitous Sina Verified badge, he looks like just about everyone else out there.

Just last month, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) launched a Government Edition of its Weibo microblogging platform that helps the Chinese government to get online and tweet to its people. It essentially has the same layout as the more popular brand pages. And this is what’s helping the police – and other agencies – get onto Weibo.

As I found out from local news sites citing the Guangzhou Daily, Duan is remarkable for not tweeting in official-speak (in a People’s Republic where all other officials are). The Jiujiang Police he still works for still channels “police language” on its “public” account, but his own verified account, on which he tweets for up to five hours a day, is remarkably civilian-ish in language. One of his Weibo virtual badges tells that he’s a big fan of Taiwanese actress and singer Barbie Hsu (aka Da S). (You’d hardly expect that from the average officer!) Of course, being inside the system, so to speak, Duan’s got a few things he can’t tweet about. For example — sexy pictures, or other illegal content.

But outside of unconstitutional content, there’s a lot that Duan’s tweeting about. China’s mountains of government cars is a contentious issue to which Duan has a pretty sharp point of view: these cars can no longer fall outside of legal supervision. Next up? Get the law to control them. Churn out a new government car law. “Even if you were just born when government vehicle reforms were just being floated, by now, you’d have grown up,” as he tweets. Precisely: the issue’s been on the table for just about 18 years.

And while Duan can’t immediately take away those traffic jams, what he can take away is that cold official-speak from government officials. In a nation where the state-sanctioned seven o’clock news has been plagued by rather clueless gov-speak for the past three decades, it sure is a breath of fresh air.

Die zombie dieeeee!

Charles Chao, the CEO of Sina, was on TV last Saturday with Yang Lan (who was called the “Oprah of China” at TED). The topic of the show was Weibo, currently the hottest property of the Chinese Internet media giant, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA). The interview, titled “Sina Weibo’s Growing Pains,” is fairly long, stretching to about 20 minutes (embedded below in Chinese).

In the interview, Charles Chao revealed that although he expected Sina Weibo to grow quickly prior to its launch, he didn’t expect it to grow that quickly and eventually became an essential tool for Chinese netizens.

There have been, however, negative aspects to Weibo’s fast growth and viral impact. Rumors can spread so quickly that netizens find it hard to decipher what’s real and what’s not.

Also, many of Weibo’s “users” are zombie accounts that people can actually pay to get as “fans.” On the zombie issue, Chao said that Sina has a team to crack down on them. The main target isn’t those ones who use zombie accounts to promote themselves but those who are using zombies to defame/accuse other Weibo users.

Chao also sees Sina Weibo as adopting bits of Twitter and Facebook and said that Weibo isn’t really a social network, but more like a media network. Some of the main differences between Twitter and Weibo include the Chinese SNS’s threaded conversations, file storage, virtual currency, and also its selection of games.

Hat tip: iChinaStock

Arthur Chow from 6waves Lolapps. Yes, I forgot to take a new photo of him...

During the course of the Disrupt Beijing event that finished yesterday, I caught up with Arthur Chow (pictured right) from 6waves Lolapps, the Hong Kong and San Francisco-based gaming company, to chat about its plans for getting onto social gaming platforms in mainland China.

This new leg of the company’s journey kicked off only last weekend, with the announcement of its acquisition of Chinese game studio Smartron5. Arthur explains that he picked up this young company because it comprises an “experienced team doing AAA titles.” It also snags them Gage Galinger, who’s behind such gaming ventures as Blizzard and Starcraft, and he will now become 6waves Lolapps’ VP of content development and will lead operations in China. It brings the whole company up to about 170 employees, including the new Beijing operations.

Explaining the assets they’ve now acquired, Arthur points out:

Gage knows consumers’ preferences and how social games work … [Smartron5] will help us make games that can be exported, like to Japan or Korea, on Mixi or CyWorld.

It’ll also bring the company faster into mobile gaming, and they’re now hiring engineers and designers for that. The team has not yet decided whether to opt for premium or freemium for its China-oriented mobile games once they arrive on the scene.

6waves Lolapps' social game Ravenskye City, which is huge on Facebook right now.

Coming to China

6waves Lolapps is now planning out a serious and broad push into China as soon as possible, and is, Arthur says, looking at all serious options, such as Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo’s new gaming platform, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) QQ Games, Kaixin, etc. “Tencent is the platform you can’t ignore. So that makes perfect sense for us.” He adds:

For a game to be successful in China, it needs community management – like, maintaining relationships with users, and getting user feedback that you can channel back [to developers].

There’ll be “a game for China in two to three months” and they’ll pick a popular title for its first release that it can learn from , such as a resource-management game. Ravenskye City (pictured above) is actually the company’s biggest game, with about three million gamers on Facebook, so that’s one feasible option for its first social title in China.