Add Circles to Your Sina Weibo Experience With This ‘Interesting’ New App

A sweet-looking new app from a Chinese startup lets you ‘circle’ and categorize the people you follow on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo, for easy grouping of your favourite ‘tweeters.’ And while it sounds great in theory, in practice I found it of limited use.

The app is called Qu Wen Qian Zi – or, literally, Interesting Circles – and is made by a startup who seems to be called either ‘Interesting,’ or perhaps 17qz; I’ll go with the latter. Its minimal UI is enticing and sexily subtle, and easy third-party sign-in via your Sina Weibo account makes for an easy start.

Choose some of your Weibo follows and put them into circles - one by freakin' one.

The Interesting Circles app (so far for Android only, but with an iPhone version in the works) then shows you a bunch of people you follow – but not, it seems, everyone; the selection appeared random – and you then need to make new circles and add people to them. I made a ‘startups’ circle, and tried to add someone, and then realised that I needed to fire them a Weibo message in order for the process to work. That sounds like a bit of a nag, but I suppose it’s an inevitable promotional move. Thankfully, though, that other person does not need to also use the service for the encircling magic to work.

...Oh, and you'll have to spam your Weibo buddies before you add them to a circle.

After giving it a try this evening, I found it far too fiddly – there’s no mass drag-and-drop function like you can do in the Google+ web app – and not worth the effort of categorizing the people I follow on Weibo. The people I most want to listen to are the ones whom I’ve already memorized, and there are inevitably people I don’t know how to categorize but that I’m following out of politeness. After adding a couple of people, I gave up the will to add more. Some people will find more utility in it, I’m sure.

The Sina Weibo web app already has a groups feature. And while it’s admittedly not so sweet-looking – and missing from the company’s official mobile app – it’s good enough for most people not to need a separate solution.

What would be much more useful in terms of a new app would be a way to build upon one’s Weibo contacts more meaningfully, such as an app that’d let me add more business-related info to some Weibo followers, and then incorporate/sync them in my contacts. As it stands, the concept of circles is great, but it’s an extra labor the way this is done.

Get the Android app direct from 17qz’s homepage.