Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service

Written by Tangos on August 29, 2009
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About ten days ago, Sina started testing its Twitter-like service, Sina Microblogging, when many other Twitter-copycats in China have been shut down by the authorities.

Like Twitter, Sina Microblogging allows users to post short messages less than 140 Chinese characters, you can follow other users to get their updates, but Sina called followers as fans. You can send SMS or MMS to update messages after you set up your mobile phone. It also support hashtag # syntax for easily tracking topics. Users can also add an image to their message. Sina even provides official url shortener too, all url will be shorten as http://sinaurl.cn.

However, for two most important feature of Twitter, i.e. @ and Retweet, the features are quite different in Sina Microblogging. Sina has a feature called reply which is similar to @, but actually totally different. Sina’s reply acually is comment feature in blogs, the reply will not show in your “tweets”, so it is a one-to-one conversation, not one-to-many conversation for Twitter’s @.

Several years ago, when Sina started its blogging service, it was a late-comer in blogging market, but it successfully invited many celebrities to start blogging in Sina’s platform, which attracted many readers and made it one of the top blogging platform in China. It is expected that Sina would adopt similar strategy for its micro-blogging service, to promote celebrities’ micro-blogging, maybe that’s why they called followers as fans.

Sina is not the first one to copy Twitter in China, but many copycats have encountered many troubles from government regulators, and Twitter was blocked for months already. That might not be a big problem for Sina, since Sina already has a strict self-censorship policies and methods.

Tencent actually has launched a Twitter-clone, Tencent Taotao.com, in 2007, but it is not very influential in the market. But some reports said Taotao has 40 million users already. Will Tencent starts to make efforts to promote Taotao after Sina enters this market?

5 Responses to “Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service”

  1. Dylen on August 30th, 2009 7:49 am

    It’s more like Plurk.

  2. Twitter Trackbacks for Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service : China Web2.0 Review [cwrblog.net] on Topsy.com on August 30th, 2009 2:58 pm

    [...] Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service : China Web2.0 Review http://www.cwrblog.net/1345/sina-starts-twitter-like-service.html – view page – cached About ten days ago, Sina started testing its Twitter-like service, Sina Microblogging, when many other Twitter-copycats in China have been shut down by the authorities. — From the page [...]

  3. Jason on September 3rd, 2009 12:28 am

    Any idea if Twitter is still blocked in China?

  4. Funny Mobile SMS on September 15th, 2009 7:07 pm

    I think more and more micro-blogging services should enter the market. It would generate some healthy competition in terms of quality if not price.

  5. zxy on September 18th, 2009 11:49 pm

    感觉不错啊

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