The discussion about Sina Weibo and Twitter

Mon 8 August 2011 09:03, Qin Hu

I'm very glad to see the comment on the article I wrote :'Sina Weibo – A Chiness Twitter clone?' from Marco van Duyvendijk. And although I might or might not agree to some extent I am very anxious to see how the final English version is going to be worked out. Nevertheless, I have done some research in order to find out how other people view Sina Weibo's English version versus Twitter. No surprise, there are two different opinions generally, which are supportive and skeptical. Let's have a look!

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(Businessinsider.com; Blairgu says; Hanneshelander; pen-olson; Scooter; Rami Khater)

It is clear enough that many people are skeptical in accepting to Sina Weibo compared with Twitter. Of course, some people do agree with the valued features on Sina Weibo. The most concern is how Sina Weibo is going to deal with possible censorship issues. As I mentioned before, I am really expect anxious to find out.

In the meantime, another question came across my mind. How will Sina Weibo's English version cooperate with its Chinese version? After some more googling work, I found some interesting opinions. From a Linkedin group 'China Going Global – Building Chinese Global Brands'.

Ashley Sutcliffe: Is this actually going to be two separate platforms, or just an English interface into the existing Chinese platform? A separate unique Weibo1 is unlikely to be a success.

Christian Dougoud | 杜谷: This is a good question. Obviously, it is going to be a challenge for Sina to deal with two languages on the same platform. My guess is that it is going to be a same platform but with choice of interface. So most of the content will be in Chinese, at least to start with.

Ashley Sutcliffe: Christian, that makes sense. They already have a drop down menu for trad/simple Chinese, so introducing English will not be a big job. I notice that there are already quite a foreigners Weibo'ing purely in English these days anyway.

To sum up, it seems that many people have already been paying attention to Sina Weibo according to the discussions above. I am happy with it, no matter if those discussions are supportive or doubtful.

Picture is from Technode.com

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