While surfing around Tencent Weibo today, we realized something unique about the Chinese microblogging site – it has launched an option to view it in English. Which means that it has beaten its sworn rival Sina Weibo to the punch.
Fellow blogger Willis Wee is also seeing Tencent Weibo in English automatically – probably by detecting the default language of our browser or OS.
It seems like there’s some IP-sensing arrangement to ensure that the right readers in various geographical locations are getting the appropriate language version. We made a check in U.S, India and Malaysia, and indeed t.qq.com is showing up in English rather than in Chinese. However, the Chinese version continues to show in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Tencent Weibo now supports simplified Chinese and English, while rival Sina Weibo supports both simplified and traditional Chinese character sets. Sina has an English version in the works – but clearly Tencent has won this race.
Sina Weibo’s most popular user is the actress Yao Chen, who gathered 10 million followers back in July of this year, and now has 12.5 million. In contrast, Tencent Weibo’s hottest user is the athlete Liu Xiang – you can follow him here – who has already sprinted to 22.6 million fans.
The English version of Tencent Weibo - as seen on the page of actress Shu Qi.
It’s interesting to see that many Chinese celebrities are not using both – perhaps earning endorsement money from being loyal to only one of China’s two biggest microblogging platforms. Some Chinese celebs are agnostic, however – such as Hong Kong actress Shu Qi (pictured above).
It’s somewhat surprising that Tencent has beaten Sina over its English version despite Sina Weibo being the first to announce its intention to the world. It’s also unexpected that Tencent would do it so quietly – we think it slipped out over the weekend. We’re still unsure how Tencent will promote its microblogging services to English-speaking markets. Perhaps through celebrity endorsement, just as it did in China.
We’ll contact Tencent to see if we can get any update on this story.
[Written with Willis Wee, in ninja-blogging realtime]
Wow, that’s awesome. It has a bit of Chinglish here and there though, but still good.
Actually you can manually switch UI language to your like. Scroll to the very bottom of your home page if you are seeing it in Chinese. The link on the right hand side of the bottom navigation bar might be saying 简体中文. Hover your cursor, and click “English” from the dropdown menu, and lo and behold!
It’s pretty new indeed. Just last week there were only Chinese Traditional/Simplified for users to switch around.
I’m totally not a penguine lover but on this microblog thingie I’m all on Tencent’s side. If you look carefully enough and use it often, you will notice Tencent throwing new bits into the mash every couple of weeks. So far I’ve seen it adding the following features:
- “Morph” into any of your microblog friends by clicking a link on his/her page. To “morph” into somebody grants you access to your friend’s public timeline (no DM & mention access, be at ease).
- “Mood curve”. Choose a mood face every day and the system generates a mood curve for ya. See your highs & lows on a nice chart.
- Post a poll. You can create a poll super handy and tweet it on Tencent Weibo.
- Post a question. Quickly ask the entire Tencent weibo society some questions looking for input.
- Post screenshots. On step forward from tweeting pictures, it loads a browser plugin which allows you to make screenshots and tweet them.
- Post multiple pictures. Upload a big bunch and pictures and they will be automatically merged into one. Saves lots of precious tweet space from a legion of shortened URLs.
- Auto screenshot for posted video. Somebody posted a video and you don’t want to expand it (enduring buffering time maybe) to see it all? No worries. On Tencent weibo a screenshot (of 0:01) of the posted video will be automatically generated. You can have a look of that to get some idea on what it’s about.
- Tweet music. You can search for a track from QQ Music’s gigantic music library and tweet it to your followers, who could either download or stream it with one click.
Aside from that, the lack of censorship is what makes Tencent weibo so much better. I’m following a small cluster of inharmonious bastards (me is one too XD) there, and I’ve never seen any of them complain any of their tweets being deleted by the system. Yeah Tencent shuts down whole accounts in really bad cases, but come on, 90% normal users are relatively free from the harassment.
I think although carrying at the very least “no less” users than Sina weibo does, Tencent is less visible because of these factors:
- As the master of China’s #1 IM and #1 blogging service and probably #1 email service supported by some 600 million registered users, it doesn’t have to fight for visibility. You ever used the QQ IM? You have a Qzone blog? You’ve got a QQ mail account? Whichever, you can update your Tencent weibo account where you already are, no need for registering to something else or installing extra bits or keeping another browser tab open.
- It came into the game later, missing the initial “China’s twitter clone showing up” buzz, thus it’s a lot less known to foreigners. But anyway, if you’ve been on the Chinese web for long enough you certainly know Tencent *NEVER* came first, not even with QQ IM which was a fairly late ICQ clone.
- It’s already doing pretty fine now, I mean with celebrities and a huge bunch of nobodies, and on the trendy front Rovio Mobile and Halfbrick have either created official account here or have done user interaction on Tencent weibo.
Kind of got a feeling Tencent will overthrow Sina both visibly and invisibly, by the end of this year.
wow. nice analysis. Thanks Kane
I’m an English teacher at Tencent, and I’m not surprised at all.
Hi Carl, are you part of the team that helped to translate?
Sina Weibo has had its English version since the start of July, 2011 – so don’t know if Tencent beat it to the punch. Sina Weibo has a lot of crappy English, though, and prefer to just use it in Chinese. Am not sure if it automatically turns to English according to IP.
Hi Ross. Thanks for the comment. They did have an English iPhone app - http://www.techinasia.com/techinasia/2011/04/25/sina-weibo-english-iphone-app/
So technically, they are still considered first to launch an English interface. But definitely not on the web. Sina did announce its intention to do so though. http://www.techinasia.com/techinasia/2011/06/07/sina-weibo-english/
Should be worth to try.
I wonder how it works for those who try to register in it through the English interface.
no. but i did help out on the English version of QQ. Best damn IM i’ve ever used.
no. but i did help out on the English version of QQ. Best damn IM i’ve ever used.
How does anEnglish speaking person get to post comment on Weibo? Kong Qingdong ‘s comments would indicate a very unhappy, insecure man, one who is dissatisfied with his plight in life. Insulting people is not a path to discussion….and by the way, dogs are loyal, affectionate, steadfast, and usually have an even temperament, something to which the professor could aspire. He is one rude, angry guy!