Baidu To Close Its Shuoba Microblog This Month

It looks like Baidu is bowing out of the microblogging race, as it has just announced that it will be shutting down its Baidu Shuoba (or ‘Talk Bar’) later this month. The service had already paused registrations last May after its real-name system didn’t take off.

If you visit the microblog homepage today, you’ll be greeted with an alert informing you of the upcoming closure. Here’s a rough translation:

Respected customer,

Due to the company’s operational changes, starting today Shuoba is accepting no new user posts/updates, and on August 22 the entire Shuoba service will stop. Please back-up your personal data [from Shuoba] at this time.

For bringing about this inconvenience, we ask for your understanding, and at the same time welcome you to come over to our Tieba and Zhidao products and enjoy our many Baidu community services.

Baidu Shuoba
August 8, 2011

When we reviewed Shuoba back in April we liked its Plurk-like additions, but didn’t really see how it could win out against the more developed offerings from Sina, Tencent and Netease. Whatever the case, Shuoba is packing in in. Although if you frequently use Baidu, you can always use its search box to send out third-party microblog updates.

For a better idea of remaining players in China’s microblog scene, check out this informative graphic from Digimind that we posted earlier today.

[Via China Internet Watch]