Review: Baidu Arrives Fashionably Late to the Twitter/Weibo Party, and wants your Phone Number

Baidu has fully launched its own Twitter-like platform, with its new Baidu Shuoba (说吧 meaning ‘Talk’) site. But it arrives late to a very crowded microblogging party, where Baidu’s main portal rivals, such as Sina, 163.com, and Tencent have already gained some popularity with their own Twitter-esque sites.

Baidu Shuoba will need to talk loudly and persuasively if it’s to generate excitement amongst Chinese netizens, and urgently needs to entice the right balance of celebrities, corporations and regular users to play along and ‘tweet’ their 140-character missives.

The microblogging craze in China is known by its translated term, ‘Weibo’. In terms of nomenclature, Sina’s Weibo site stole the march by using that generic term as its name (and nabbing the Weibo.com and Weibo.cn URLs) and then, in its 8 months of operation so far, garnering some of China’s most marketing-desirable users – the young and tech-savvy, with money to spend.

What’s your number, honey?
So, although Baidu is far-and-away the king of ‘search’ in China, it’s short of a social success story. Perhaps that’s why Baidu has taken a slightly different tack with its Shuoba, compared to Sina’s and Tencent’s Weibo platform.

First, Baidu reeeeally wants your phone number. Thus, a Chinese mobile number is needed to even register with the site (upon sign-up, a SMS is sent with a short code to finalize your registration). This sounds like Baidu sees great monetization in having the tweets, user info and phone numbers of potentially so many people. At the moment, posting via SMS is not an option (but it’s coming). Rival Sina Weibo does not require a phone number at all, though one can optionally be added in the settings pane, and then tweet-via-SMS can be enabled, too.

Also, Baidu Shuoba has gone for a different name: the ‘Talk’ moniker is more reminiscent of an IM app. I guess they wanted to avoid the ‘Weibo’ name that Sina applied – and then Tencent decided to copy – and suggest a less geeky, more conversational approach.

As for the looks, Shuoba is very much a clone of Sina Weibo (see my side-by-side comparison, below), which in turn aped earlier Zuosa.com and FanFou.com – both of whom copied the original Twitter.com user-interface. As with Sina’s Weibo – and in contrast to Twitter – there are blog-like comments, in addition to the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions.

The only stand-out thing visible on Baidu’s new site is the animated trending timeline (see the header image, top), which is a scrollable, Flash-powered stream of photos and texts from selected Shuoba users. It somewhat resembles the central Plurk UI. It’s an optional viewing pane, which can be hidden – but it gives a pleasant way to browse trends and amusing pictures chronologically.

Check out three more screenshots, below. First up is the conventional timeline; second is a side-by-side comparison of Shuoba (on the left) and Sina Weibo (on the right); third shows the Shuoba iPhone app (Android version available, too):