Moke App for Weibo: Dawn of the Tweetbot Replicants

China’s most vibrant Twitter-esque service, Sina Weibo, has a stylish new third-party iPhone app in the form of Moke (pronounced ‘mor-kur,’ as in the Chinese). The new app looks a lot – perhaps a bit too much – like Tweetbot (see the comparison below), the popular Twitter client created by Tapbots.

Moke was made by Chinese developer Ling Wang, who gained some global recognition earlier this year for the elegant ‘to do’ app Voodo. The new Moke is a free app that supports English and Chinese, and contains a ‘pro’ in-app purchase for US$2.99. It’s a welcome addition to the three alternative Weibo mobile apps that I looked at last year, and a strong challenger to the most attractive of those, Weico.

While it would’ve been nice to see a more original design used, Moke looks like a sweet way to access all the main Weibo functions, such as comments, retweets, private messages, new followers, user profiles, etc. While we’re all fans – though also harsh critics – of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) microblog service here at TiA, the official Sina app is textbook bloatware, crammed with all the social gaming elements that Weibo has, plus location-based checkins and local weather and trends and the kitchen sink. It’s all just too much. And so Moke – and the fine-looking Weico as well – offers a respite from that, and a speedier way to do the essentials such as fire off Weibo tweets and sees who’s interacting with you. That’s all that’s needed. Plus some eye-candy is nice too.

Get the Moke app – which requires iOS 5 to run – from the iTunes Store, or follow along its progress on the app’s new Weibo page.