Microblogging service Sina Weibo is set to move to Weibo.com tomorrow according to Chinabyte citing sources within the company. There’s been talk of a possible Weibo spin-off for some time now with possible IPO looming, and this move to an independent domain will certainly keep that discussion going.
The report explains that the microblog’s current domain t.sina.com.cn will continue to exist along side Weibo.com for now, with both addresses allowing users to login to the service. But eventually they will be unified as Weibo.com. The mobile site for the service t.sina.cn will redirect to weibo.cn, without any adverse affect on the user.
This effort to make Weibo a more separate entity is not a huge surprise, as this sort of move has been anticipated by many over the past few weeks. In particular, Forbes’ Gady Epstein wrote an excellent overview of reasons why Sina might pursue a Weibo IPO:
[A] Weibo IPO seems to make sense for Sina boss [Charles] Chao for one big additional reason: money. Chao came to Sina in 1999 as a professional manager, so he is not a founding tech billionaire like some of his peers in China . . . But he is the founder of Sina Weibo.
Much like it’s western counterpart, Twitter, Weibo has yet to implement a solid revenue model. But as China’s leading microblog with over 100 million users since it started in August 2009, Weibo is on a trajectory that should have investors drooling.
If you’d like to try your hand on Weibo, there are some useful guides in English here and here.
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