Where China's Weibo Beats Facebook and Twitter 68
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."
Unconvincing To Say the Least (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [twitter.com] 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.
Re:Unconvincing To Say the Least (Score:5, 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...