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Sina Starts Twitter-Like Service

From China Web 2.0 - August 29, 2009

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?