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."
My favorite feature (Score:3, Funny)
It tells what I think and writes messages for me! Praise our glorious leader.
Better than USA (Score:1)
Nobody in china praises the dear leaders. Even state media has toned it to almost nonexistence.
Compare that to USA, where Obama worshiping is at an embarrassing and disgusting level.
At least no Chinese said the leader makes his legs tingling.
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.
One stop for online needs and monitoring (Score:1)
Seems like a great one-site-fits-all-needs service. So convenient for the user and those monitoring/policing the user's behaviors, interests and opinions; and for discovering individuals who may be like minded.
Re:Unconvincing To Say the Least (Score:4, 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".
Re: (Score:2)
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".
The really scary thing is that already sounds 15000% more interesting than World of Warcraft level grinding.
Re: (Score:2)
ZING!
China is still Circa 2004-2005 (Score:2)
Mod up parent, couldn't have said it better. Then again, this is China where having a smart phone means you're rich. They haven't gone through their MySpace phase. It's like when I went to Japan over a decade and a half ago and saw Doragon Bru (had to look that up to remember). All I could think was, oh for crying out loud, we're still stuck on freaking Power Rangers. I told a friend there that we'll enjoy it in America too years after I'd returned. That's where China is, round about 2004-2005.
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Give me a break. The obvious point was that, surprise, the author (since the OP says "guy", "man", etc several times) and many readers of the article are NOT all professional male tech geeks like majority of the /. audience, so there is nothing wrong inherently wrong or "shill" about Pokemon or MySpace *if* that's what the user it interested in; implying there is would make the same mistake as the author does in her comparisons.
There is absolutely nothing insulting with being described as a mid-20's Asian
Re: (Score:1)
Foundered, not floundered (Score:4, Informative)
it was an accident (Score:2)
he didnt type it on porpoise
Re: (Score:3)
dr demento (Score:2)
and kip adotta made me do it
Re: (Score:1)
When a ship sinks, it does indeed founder. But that has no bearing on the definition of "flounder" which can indeed mean "to experience difficulty and be likely to fail" http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/flounder#flounder_8
Re: (Score:2)
P.S.: I also sent Macmillan an e-mail pleading with them not list "ax" as an alternate spelling for "ask".
Why You Might Join China's Largest Social Network (Score:4, 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?
Re: (Score:3)
trust(china + social networking site) = floor(trust(china),trust(social networking site))
Trust a Chinese web site with my personal data? (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It can identify political dissidents 5x faster (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
WEEABOO! WEEABOO! WEEABOO!
It reminds me of the now defunct Internet portals (Score:1)
Honestly, it looks awful, it doesn't look like a social networking website, it looks more as a commercial Internet portal, the kind that were around over 10 years ago. I already have a lot of troubles trusting some of my personal information to US based Internet services, I can't see why in the world I would trust it to a Chinese based one. Is there really nothing better to post in Slashdot today?, Lately all news appear to be about social networks, the cloud, or bitcoin, and not just in Slashdot.
Re: (Score:1)
Ok (yeah, a reply to myself), it was an exaggeration to claim that all news are about this, and this doesn't have an undo button. But I stand behind my assertion that this was not Slashdot material and that the site looks awful.
Google returned to china? (Score:2)
Was I offline that week? When did this happen?
-molo
Re: (Score:2)
It didn't.
Wow... (Score:2)
Does anyone else think this article reads like it was written by an idiotic teenage girl?
Awful site (Score:1)
It's like Facebook, except with more intrusive advertising and several of the annoyances that killed Myspace. Most importantly, though, the site is run by the freedom-destroying Chinese government. Why in the hell would you want to share anything at all with China, unless forced to by the barrel of a gun?
Re: (Score:2)
Because some brain dead idiot says it's ultra cool and like pokemon?
Re: (Score:2)
Private v. "Private" (Score:2)
The PRC is not quite to the stage where the concept 'rule of law' has supplanted 'rule of men', and PATRIOT Act-related BS that the likes of AT&T get into in the US is par for the course. Sina is listed on NASDAQ, but home plate and most of their action is back in Shanghai, as are the major shareholders. http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/insider/InsiderRoster.jsp?tkr=SINA [forbes.com]
Ugly UI (Score:1)
Weibo = microblogging (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Weibo lacks security (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.
Horde to the Wailoh (Score:1)
The summary feels like an indigenous to Sina shill, bashing Google in the process. Hightailed? Ran came back? Left the PRC went to HK's Two System's One Nation: anyone, anyone? "Those dumb Americans wont know that, dew neh!" Indeed.