A hell of a lot has happened in China in the past seven years. Twitter-esque Weibo captured the zeitgeist and had an impact on many of the things that occurred in that time. Photo credit: SteveC.
Every single minute of every day, just over 64,000 posts and reposts flood the stream of Weibo, the social network oft-misunderstood and mispronounced outside of China. It’s basically China’s supercharged answer to Twitter.
Weibo launched August 14, 2009 – exactly seven years ago today. It cloned Twitter – which had been blocked in China just a month earlier – with surgical precision but added a few things of its own, such as comments. Other unique features of Weibo, such as quoted retweets, photos, and links not counting towards your character limit, would eventually be adopted by Twitter.
“Despite Weibo being this highly censored space, far from a Twitter-like liberal and free online environment, it did contribute to a more open online debate of many societal issues, and has brought forth a better-informed and assertive Chinese online audience,” says Manya Koetse, founder of the Whats On Weibo blog.
“In my view, that is the biggest contribution and impact of Weibo in China.”
Here’s our highlight reel of scandals and social media developments on Weibo over the past seven years.
August 14, 2009: To begin at the beginning
Chinese web giant Sina, best known for its Yahoo-esque web portal, takes a stab at Twitter and numerous Chinese microblogging services that have popped up in the past few months by launching what’s initially called Sina Weibo. The “weibo” name is a generic word for “microblogging.”
“Weibo was one module of Sina’s social networking project ‘Pengyou’, which was cancelled and never went live,” says Gong Min, a marketing manager at Weibo, to Tech in Asia. The word pengyou means “friend” in Chinese.
Fall 2009: Celeb allure
Weibo realizes that celebrities will be crucial to the success of the new social media site, so it begins luring them in with the promise of free publicity and a new way of interacting with fans in real-time.
At time of publishing, actress Yao Chen is Weibo champ with nearly 80 million followers. She’s been a keen Weibo user since the early days. This is a post from July 31, 2016.
Kaifu Lee, head of Google China until his resignation in September after the tech giant shut down its Chinese search engine in dramatic fashion, initially leads the stars in terms of followers. That month I wrote on a now-defunct site that Lee had 13,220 “fans,” as Weibo calls them.
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