As Sure As Night Follows Day, Tencent Launches a Pinterest Clone

With grim inevitability, we see that the Chinese social media behemoth Tencent (HKG:0700) has today launched a Pinterest clone called Dutu. Like all such social pinboard sites, it’s all about sharing and collecting interesting images.

The site, at dutu.qq.com (pictured above), comes fully integrated with Tencent Weibo, its popular microblogging service, as well as a user’s wider QQ account. This makes Dutu into, potentially, the world’s biggest Pinterest-like site from day one. If someone is already signed-in to the Tencent Weibo web app, then Dutu allows users to share anyone’s publicly pinned photos with just one click.

It’ll be interesting to see if the company’s main microblog rival, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), feels the need to copy this as well. Sure, Sina Weibo already has image storage and photo libraries way beyond what Twitter offers, but the Sina Qing light-blog concept was a bit of a flop, so perhaps a Pinterest-like offering of its own would gain more traction.

Tencent’s clone comes just a month after similar imitations by other major Chinese web companies, such as Renren’s Plaza, and Qihoo’s awkwardly-named I Like.

[UPDATE one hour after publishing: The CEO of one of China’s largest startup Pinterest clones which is called Mogujie (lit: Mushroom Street), says that his site has 6 million registered users. Also, it’s interesting to note how simple Tencent’s Dutu is, compared to Mogujie or Renren’s Plaza, as those latter two are mostly focused on sharing images of clothes and linking to e-commerce sites so as to drive traffic to a user’s own online store].