Chinese like copy, so western people normally call Chinese Twitter ( Weibo in Chinese pronunciation ) as Twitter Clone.

QQ Releases a Chinese Twitter Clone

The Chinese Twitter clones are rolling out the software factory doors at a frightening pace. Another new entrant is now trying to get marketshare.

TaoTao is one that has a good chance to make it. It's backers are QQ , the insanely popular messaging network. QQ is currently the number 10 website in the world (according to alexa) and at one point in time, a vast majority of the Chinese net population used QQ as their IM solution. They have millions and millions of users to say the least. If they do a good job of cross marketing they should be able to get almost instant uptake. It will also be interesting on how they integrate with their existing QQ service and mobile phones.

Does any of this Chinese stuff matter? Yes, we think so. At the end of last year there were 137 million web users in China (by official goverment accounts) and by the end of 2007 that is projected to hit 200 million. You see, soon there will be more Internet users in China than ALL OF THE PEOPLE in the USA. The stakes are high and the west doesn't have access to the market (for the most part) due to language and other barriers.

Aug. 14, 2007

QQ suspended its Taotao.com on 30th Oct. 2009, now it has it's own microblog service http://t.qq.com.

If you think there was only one twitter-like website in China, then you need to adjust it a little bit. Here is the list of Chinese twitters:

Twitter is a social network micro-blogging services. The Twitter Clones (micro-blogging services) and it looks like one of the Chinese Twitters are gaining popularity quickly. Here is the most popular Twitter-clone sites in China what I known.

FanFou – FanFou is the biggest Twitter-like site in China. It seems FanFou copied almost everything of Twitter, you can use FanFou to update “what are you doing” in less than 140 characters, it supports updating and receiving notification via Gtalk, MSN, QQ, mobile phone and web, you can follow the updates of your friends, and turn on/off the notification of your friends. It already has a wordpress plugin, maxthon plug and other 3rd party add ons. It also has two Twittervision-like mashups that put Tweets on the 3D globe and a 2D map of China. Xing Wang is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FanFou.

JiWai.de – JiWai.de is the first Chinese brother of twitter: an online service that enables user to broadcast short messages to your friends or “followers.” It also lets you specify which JiWai.de users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place. Just like twitter, Jiwai supports updating through sms and gtalk. Updating from mobile phones onto jiwai.de, however, compared with Twitter, saves considerable money for Chinese users who want to use twitter-like stuff. To meet the demand of more Chinese users, Jiwai.de also supports updating from some other IMs, including MSN, skype, and QQ. Zhuohuan Li is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JiWai.de.

TaoTao – Tencent QQ is the most popular IM in China. While Tencent has realized the value of micro-blogging, they launched a stand-alone service called Taotao. Not like FanFou, TaoTao only support updating from QQ and Web. It have no widget support. Since Tencent has the most extensive im user base, and the characteristics of this kind of micro-blogging service also match with profile of QQ’s users.

Other Micro-blogging Site in China:

zuosa – http://zuosa.com
ilaodao – http://ilaodao.cn
komoo – http://komoo.cn
byuu – http://byuu.com
wulog – http://wulog.com
fish – http://fish.sh
laigula – http://laigula.com

Feb. 2008

As Twitter is outnumbered by the Chinese Twitter Copycats, so maybe Chinese would win the microblogging campaign.

Attack of the Chinese Twitter Clones

Dr. Song Li, a very successful Chinese web-entrepreneur, seems to be pulling it off again. He recently launched Digu (嘀咕), a Chinese miniblogging service currently still in Beta that people in the West will soon unrightfully refer to as ‘the biggest Chinese Twitter’. Ok, admitted, Digu shares some major similarities with Twitter: it is a microblogging service and has a Twitterrish (or new Facebook startpage?) interface, but there is plenty more to it.

So what makes this service so special compared to Twitter or the many Chinese Twitter copycats such as TaoTao, FanFou, Jiwai, Komoo (checkout their funky design!), Zuosa, etc etc? First of all Digu – which sounds like whisper in Chinese – focuses a lot more on both entertainment and mobile. For instance from the start users can also share pictures rather than just text and hyperlinks. Besides a fancy looking design and offering a set of animated emoticons that’s basically it as far as differences go. But wait, that’s not the interesting part of the story! The interesting part is Digu’s strategy for becoming ‘The Chinese Twitter’ or whatever you want to call it.

Besides hiring 62 ‘whispering’ Chinese celebrities, which is a proven strategy for quickly attracting a userbase in China, the critical success factor of Digu has everything to do with its founder Dr. Li Song. Song is the co-founder of MeMeStar, a Chinese mobile mobile value-added service provider sold for $20.8 to Sina in 2003 and is founder/CEO of SinoFriends.com, a successful Chinese online dating service. Needless to say Dr. Song has enough cash to spend on his new venture so Digu is seeded very well.

As a result even before their official launch, in the Beta version, Digu can be updated from almost all relevant platforms available in the market, both Chinese and Western(!). Among others users can update their status and upload pictures from, QQ (leading Chinese IM service that in February this year recorded 50 million peak concurrent users), MSN, Sina, e-mail, Firefox, and Gtalk. Of course a mobile version is also available, which adds up in China with over 650 million mobile phone users. The service can even be synchronized with Twitter and several Chinese Twitter clones!

Posted by Pieter-Paul on April 1st, 2009

But Chinese Twitter-like websites have their own problem to face.

Users fear big Chinese Twitter-like site may not reopen

A popular Chinese microblog service shut down last July amid ethnic riots in China triggered concern among users on Tuesday that it may not reopen.

Fanfou was one of several Twitter-style sites in China that was shut down as part of a communications clampdown after ethnic violence that took nearly 200 lives in the country's western Muslim region, Xinjiang. Some of the Web sites have since reopened but Fanfou has remained down, and by Tuesday its developers' blog had been revamped as a login screen for users to export and save the messages they had posted via the service.

Fanfou could not immediately be reached for comment, but local media cited a message from Fanfou saying it was still possible the Web site could come back.

Still, Chinese users of Twitter have since posted hundreds of messages about Fanfou, with some speculating that the service will not return.

"It looks like Fanfou really is dead stiff," wrote a user named AmanKuang.

"Fanfou really doesn't plan to live on," wrote another, named amystarrynight.

Chinese authorities censor Internet content through various means, including obliging Web site owners to self-censor. The owners can be punished if they do not promptly erase sensitive content, including some political content such as talk of elite government corruption, posted by users on message boards or blogs.

Chinese authorities targeted social-networking Web sites after the rioting last year because they were allegedly used to help plan the violence. After the rioting started, some users on microblog sites including Fanfou posted messages about conditions in the region.

Twitter, along with Facebook, was also blocked in China after the riots, but some Chinese users still access the service with a circumvention tool like a virtual private network (VPN).

Can Sina’s Chinese Twitter Clone Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

For years, Chinese businessmen have copied various internet ideas from the US, and modified them for the local market. They have YouTube. We have Youku. They have Facebook. We have Xiaonei…and Kaixin and 51 and Sohu Bai, and Sina Space, just to name a few.

Some launches have worked and many have failed. Today, the hot trend is to launch Twitter clones — that is, miniblog platforms for short messages.

Getting into the space seems easy: One young geek, Qu Wei, claimed on his blog that he was able to develop a miniblog platform in just 6 hours. That being said, the format is having a difficult birth in China.

Hu Yong, a media-savvy Internet pioneer, recently told the business magazine New Finance, “The strict censorship on the Internet in China is an issue that should be considered by miniblog founders…It’s like walking on a tight rope. One has to find the balance between observing the government’s regulations and satisfying the needs of a new generation of Internet users.”

A case in point is the rise and fall of Fanfou. Founded in May 2007, the Twitter clone quickly attracted more than a million users, and was on the road to attracting corporations to pay to use the platform (Hewlett Packard was its first client), before it was mysteriously shut down by government authorities on July 5th after posts appeared about the protests and riots ongoing in Xinjiang province. Apparently, the platform was too fast for the government censorship department to monitor.

Nevertheless, Fanfou was not the only option for Chinese tweeters. Dozens of other companies have tried to emulate Twitter’s platform and have accumulated their own users in China. The most recent launch is the Sina miniblog, a platform hosted by Sina.com, the oldest and most renowned portal website in China. Launched in August 2009, the platform is a close approximation of Twitter — even the messages are limited to 140 words like Twitter.

What are its prospects for success? Internet observers are being cautious in their prognostications.

As the dominant news media and BBS provider for most urban Chinese today, its product will likely prove popular. Numerous celebrities, scholars, journalists and writers have used and promoted Sina’s free blog service for years, and will likely bring their followers and readers to the service.

Like Fanfou, Sina miniblog also has to contend with those who might want to post about sensitive issues. For now it is proceeding cautiously, only allowing users to register with an invitation from existing users. What’s more, Sina — along with other established Chinese internet companies such as search engine Sohu, gaming portal Netease, and instant messaging platform QQ — is an old hand with balancing “Internet regulation” and Internet users’ needs. It has a team of highly experienced editors and technicians working on shifts, using manpower or and technology, to make sure users don’t tread the “red line” too often. And, if history it is a precedent, it won’t shy away from censoring users who cross that “red line,” as it did in June this year when it closed the blog of artist and architect Ai Weiwei because of his outspoken political positions.

So, the question remains, will portal websites — “Internet dinosaurs” — such as Sina.com be able to breathe new life into the miniblog in China? Maybe. But one thing is for sure, just as Twitter’s profit picture remains murky, the Chinese clones are doing no better. Despite attracting an impressive number of users, not one of the former existing miniblog service providers has established a feasible — i.e. profit-making — business model so far.

That said, the miniblog does change one thing in China: young people are spreading information about all things big and small in their lives and feel less isolated and more connect in daily life or when things happen around them. However, balancing government regulations, users’ needs and the profit motive will remain a heavy burden for any miniblog service provider who dares to play the “troubled waters” of the Chinese internet.

September 24, 2009

After the Internet crackdown, Chinese Twitter is not Twitter anymore.

In Chinese, Twitter Actually Means “Blog”

Thanks to the Chinese language, Twitter in China has quite a different meaning.

Not literally, of course. In fact, Twitter has pretty much no meaning to the vast majority of Chinese Internet users. Along with a range of other prominent foreign-owned Social Media sites, Twitter is blocked by the government’s Great Firewall. (In addition to Facebook, YouTube and others, the movie website IMDB recently joined the list blocked sites. Hard to understand the rationale for blocking lists of actors.)

There are a number of workarounds that savvy netizens use to breach the Great Firewall, but most resort to using one of the newly created Twitter-like domestic competitors. As with Twitter these sites limit messages to 140-characters.

Therein lies the point: Since there is greater meaning conveyed by a single Chinese character than a letter in the Roman alphabet, Twitter becomes a mini-Blog.

To prove the point, my Beijing-based colleague at Ogilvy, Jeremy Webb, did a very interesting comparison between messages sent out by Dell on Twitter in English and the Twitter-like platform in China called Zuosa.

Writing in English on Twitter, @DellOutlet is, of course limited to 140 characters. There is not a lot you can say before hitting that letter limit, especially if you want to include a shortened URL. This Tweet came in at around 136 characters, so almost the maximum length.

Writing on the Chinese-language Twitter-like platform Zuosa, @delldirect manages to say a whole lot more.

In the 114 Chinese characters, the Dell microblogger said:

Dell’s National Day Sale will run from Sept 11 to Oct 8. To celebrate the 60th anniversary w. the motherland, Dell Home Computers is offering 6 cool gifts & deals on 10 computer models. These exciting offers will run non-stop for 4 weeks. Also, get a free upgrade to color casing & a 512MB independent graphics card, as well as other service upgrades. All offers are on a first-come-first-serve basis. What R U waiting 4? Act now!

Even with that message there was still space to leave a shortened URL.

In other words, 114 characters of Twitter in Chinese translate into 430 characters in English. This is well beyond the limit of a Tweet.

One result of this language efficiency is that with Twitter in China people are able write more blog-like entries. This turns Twitter and Twitter-like services into mini-blogs instead of micro-blogs.

January 12, 2010