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Where China's Weibo Beats Facebook and Twitter

Posted by timothy on from the not-complete-till-it-includes-censorship-engine dept.

HansonMB writes with this excerpt: "Launched in 2009, the micro-blogging service is owned by Chinese interweb behemoth Sina Corp, which happens to be the same company that partnered with Google before their deals famously floundered (cf those anxieties) and Google hightailed out of China (before coming back of course). Weibo is often described as a Facebook-Twitter hybrid, but anyone who takes a closer look can easily see that it's a different beast entirely. Actually, I would argue Weibo is better than both. Here's a breakdown of its standout features—some of which Google Plus has already included, and others that I'd love to see incorporated soon."

12 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. My favorite feature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    It tells what I think and writes messages for me! Praise our glorious leader.

  2. Unconvincing To Say the Least by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Alright, normally I give stuff the benefit of the doubt but this is just a slashvertisement of a Chinese site trying to penetrate the American market.

    Actually, I would argue Weibo is better than both.

    Well, if you want to do that effectively, might I suggest actually drawing the comparisons?

    Instead of having to post shortened links that direct traffic to an external site, multimedia content is integrated directly into the website’s interface, so that no one ever has to leave the Weibo ecosystem.

    Facebook has done this forever with thumbnails and it even loads in a flash player if I link to something on Bandcamp (not sure about other sites). If Wiebo doesn't redirect you an external site, how does it deal with copyright issues? Twitter will soon support images on tweets if it doesn't already for you.

    One of those Loyalty / Rewards Systems

    Not for me, thanks.

    Think of it as social networking plus Pokemon. Sounds awesome to me.

    Well, enjoy it man. I am part of a large section of the population of the United States of America that does not find Pokemon cute or entertaining. Sounds like hell to me.

    Logging into Weibo takes users to "Weibo Square," a portal filled with endless possible detours, including the hot topics of the day, most popular tweets, and highlighted celebrity users.

    Yeah, MySpace had this. It still does now that it's been sold to a marketing firm. And that's where it belongs. Social Networking is about the users. You should spend time at someone's page and trends should be a sidebar. When I see this all I can think of is Supermarket tabloid. Again, not for me.

    Okay, this section should technically be labeled “e-commerce,” but I got too excited over the prospect of being able to order food online through a social networking site.

    So one of your selling points is that on a massive social network, companies market and sell shit to you. No thanks man. I don't think you understand what "social networking" means to me. Users are the center of attention, not food or ecommerce. If you want to add those Apps and APIs and they start to get intrusive to the core experience, you're going to lose users. You can keep Weibo.

    If you call that a conclusive "better than Facebook and Twitter" discussion, you need to work on your sales pitch, shill.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Unconvincing To Say the Least by jojoba_oil · · Score: 3, Funny

      Think of it as social networking plus Pokemon. Sounds awesome to me.

      Well, enjoy it man. I am part of a large section of the population of the United States of America that does not find Pokemon cute or entertaining. Sounds like hell to me.

      Sounds like hell to you. Sounds like Gaia Online to me... which happens to be a special kind of hell that is filled with emo and scene kids who think MMORPG means "a web forum where people role-play that they're cool".

    2. Re:Unconvincing To Say the Least by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Way too harsh to the author... as the saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

      It was a rather poorly written article, but come on, motherboard.tv isn't a "Chinese shill site", just a techie pop culture web site. And IMO writing a profile of a Chinese social media app that may soon have more users than Facebook in China alone is a reasonable topic for their site - unfortunately just poor execution. But try rereading it from the understanding that the author is a mid-20's Asian female blogger of questionable writing ability, and then maybe you can take the article at face value. I agree with your criticisms of the inaccuracy and bias to personal preferences in the article, but definitely not in motivation...

  3. Foundered, not floundered by WebManWalking · · Score: 3, Informative

    When a ship sinks, it founders. Please.

  4. Why You Might Join China's Largest Social Network by the_humeister · · Score: 3, Informative

    And that's about where I stopped reading. I have automatic distrust of any social media company and the Chinese government, so why would I join one from China?

  5. Trust a Chinese web site with my personal data? by saihung · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, that's something I'm super-eager to do. I think I'll follow it up by emailing my social security number and credit card data to random .ru domains immediately after.

    1. Re:Trust a Chinese web site with my personal data? by getNewNickName · · Score: 2

      What's to say that your current favorite site will not be sold to a foreign company in the future along with all your personal data? The only way to ensure your privacy is to never put the information on the internet.

  6. It can identify political dissidents 5x faster by SomewhatRandom · · Score: 2

    It can identify political dissidents 5x faster

  7. Re:Why You Might Join China's Largest Social Netwo by steelfood · · Score: 2

    trust(china + social networking site) = floor(trust(china),trust(social networking site))

    --
    "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
  8. Re:it was an accident by theshowmecanuck · · Score: 2

    Deserves a +1, "fucking horrible pun." ;)

    --
    -- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
  9. Weibo lacks security by Rincewind42 · · Score: 2

    I signed up for Weibo last week, having lived in China for 6 years. After the signup process I decided never to use it as it was obviously insecure. During the signup/login you are asked, as usual, to create a username and password. I usually use some nice secure passwords, ten or more letters with caps, numbers and punctuation. However, Weibo popped up a error message saying that I must only use lower-case letters a-z. This massively reduces the number of password combinations.