Sina Weibo Breaks 300 Million Registered Users, Mobile Users Growing
Today, Sina published some new statistics about its microblogging service, Sina Weibo. Turns out, the inevitable has happened: the service has broken 300 million users. Yes, we all knew that announcement was coming, and here's something else you knew was coming: most of weibo's active users are now also mobile users.Of course, what Sina's release cleverly doesn't say is how many of those 300 million users are "active users." Nor does it define what it means by "active" -- users who go on weibo once a day? week? month? -- ...
Sina Weibo’s User Contract is Not a Big Deal
There's been an awful lot of hubbub about Sina Weibo's planned introduction of a user contract. The terms will reportedly be implemented on May 28, and are being interpreted as another "crackdown" on weibo freedom of speech. Specifically, much of the discussion concerns article 13, which reads like this (translation via TheNextWeb):Article 13) Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that: 1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution 2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation 3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national ...
Sina Weibo Censorship Jumps the Shark
I've seen a lot of things censored on Sina Weibo, and it's not often I am taken by surprise. I am, after all, deeply cynical when it comes to the topic of censorship in China. And censorship on weibo has gotten pretty crazy of late, with terms getting blocked left and right, sometimes even terms that come from official state media reports. But even so, I had to do a double take when I saw this on Twitter this afternoon:@ChinaGeeks 五四运动 is blocked on Weibo..— Jake Fromer (@jakefromer) May ...
Sina’s Softer Censorship: A Case Study of Search Smothering
This afternoon, the blind lawyer/dissident Chen Guangcheng left the US Embassy, where he had sought refuge after escaping illegal detention in his home village in Shandong. Chen is currently undergoing treatment at Chaoyang Hospital, accompanied by US officials and his family, who have been freed from their detention in Shandong and brought to Beijing to join him. The foreign press has been all over this, but official Chinese wire service Xinhua also released a statement condemning the US and saying that Chen had left the embassy "of his own volition."The ...
Sina Admits to Investors It Has Failed to Implement Real Name Policy on Weibo
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 ...
Sina Weibo Launches Location Platform ‘Weibo Places’
In a move that, in retrospect, we're surprised didn't happen way sooner, Sina Weibo launched a new location service today. It's called Weibo Places and it collects anything you've posted to Weibo with a Geotag, arranging your posts into a neat timeline with maps of each location. It also allows you to check in at specific locations, or search for new places to visit (which you can then mark as 'want to visit').As is evident in the first image at the top of this article, the web app can't ...
Rumor: Baidu and Other Search Engines Will Have to Stop Indexing Weibo Content
Chinese web researcher Hu Yanping has indicated there are rumors that authorities will ban Chinese search engines such as Baidu from indexing real-time search results from the country’s Twitter-like Weibo sites, such as Sina Weibo.Tests today on Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) show that the feature is still in operation, with certain trending terms appearing in the form of three microblog tweets on the Baidu first page of results (pictured above). The incorporation of microblogs in Baidu is a relatively new phenomenon, with support for Sina Weibo and then Tencent Weibo added just ...
Former Australian PM Kevin Rudd Joins Sina Weibo
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 ...
London Mayor Fails at Weibo, Copy-and-Pasting Random Messages From Twitter
Surely the key element of social media marketing is to keep it relevant. And so London Mayor, Boris Johnson, seems to be failing at reaching out to Chinese folks on his new Sina Weibo account (see it here), as it consists almost entirely of inscrutable nonsense that has been copied-and-pasted from his official Twitter page.Last night, Mr Johnson’s Weibo - now at 80,000 followers and rising rapidly - tweeted out this irrelevant message:isabellagornall you can find them at http://t.cn/zOOzf18 for just £1.50!The first name is a reference to ...
Did Sina Just Introduce — and then Kill — an Anonymous News Reporting Platform?
Another day, another weird thing happening with Sina Weibo. This morning, we came across this story on China Internet Watch about a new weibo platform launched by Sina called Weibo Expose. The platform, created by Sina in cooperation with over seventy media organizations nationwide, allowed users to easily submit news tips and images to media in a particular location. It even allowed an option for anonymous submission, and promised to protect users' identities.But the service, which is supposed to be here, seems to have disappeared, despite the fact that ...
Why I Think Real Name Registration Hasn’t Really Affected Sina Weibo
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 ...
Gnip Now Providing Access to Social Data from Sina Weibo
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 ...
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