Sina Weibo

"Weibo.com" redirects here. For China-based microblogs (weibos), see Microblogging in China. For other things named "weibo", see Weibo.
Sina Weibo
Type of site
 microblogging
Available in Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
English (incomplete)
Owner SINA Corporation (operated by Weibo Corporation)
Website weibo.com
Alexa rank Decrease 18 (March 2016)[1]
Commercial Yes
Launched 14 August 2009 (2009-08-14)[2]
Current status Active
Sina Weibo
Chinese 新浪微博
Literal meaning Sina Microblog

Sina Weibo (NASDAQ: WB) is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of Internet users, with a market penetration similar to the United States' Twitter.[3] It was launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009,[2] and as of December 2012 has 503 million registered users.[4] By the third quarter of 2015, Sina Weibo has 222 million subscribers and 100 million daily users.[5] About 100 million messages are posted each day on Sina Weibo.[6]

In March 2014, Sina Corporation announced a spinoff of Weibo as a separate entity and filed an IPO under the symbol WB.[7] Sina carved-out part 11% of Weibo in the IPO, and Alibaba owned 32% post IPO.[8] The company began trading publicly on 17 April 2014.[9]

Name

"Weibo" (微博) is the Chinese word for "microblog". Sina Weibo launched its new domain name weibo.com on 7 April 2011, deactivating and redirecting from the old domain, t.sina.com.cn to the new one. Due to its popularity, the media sometimes directly uses "Weibo" to refer to Sina Weibo. However, there are other Chinese microblogging/weibo services including Tencent Weibo (腾讯微博), Sohu Weibo (搜狐微博), and NetEase Weibo (网易微博)。

History

After the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, China shut down most of the domestic microblogging services including the first weibo service Fanfou. Many popular non-China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have been blocked from viewing since then. Sina's CEO Charles Chao considered this to be an opportunity.[10][11] SINA Corporation launched the tested version of Sina Weibo on 14 August 2009. Basic functions including message, private message, comment and re-post were made possible in September 2009. A Sina Weibo–compatible API platform for developing third-party applications was launched on 28 July 2010.[2]

On 1 December 2010, the website experienced an outage, which administrators later said was due to the increasing numbers of users and posts.[12] Registered users surpassed 100 million before March 2011.[13] Since 23 March 2011, t.cn has been used as Sina Weibo's official URL shortening domain name in lieu of sinaurl.cn. On 7 April 2011, weibo.com replaced t.sina.com.cn as the new domain used by the website. Meanwhile, the official logo was also updated.[14] In June 2011, Sina announced an English-language version of Sina Weibo would be developed and launched, where the contents would still be controlled by China's laws.[15]

Ownership

On 9 April 2013, Alibaba Group announced that it would acquire 18 percent of Sina Weibo for $586 million, with an option to buy up to 30 percent in the future.[16] When Sina Weibo went to NASDAQ, Alibaba executed the option. Now Alibaba owns 32 percent of Sina Weibo.[17]

Users

According to iResearch's report on 30 March 2011, Sina Weibo had 56.5% of China's microblogging market based on active users and 86.6% based on browsing time over competitors such as Tencent Weibo and Baidu's services.[18] The top 100 users had over 485 million followers combined. Furthermore, Sina said that more than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China use Sina Weibo. The site is maintained by a growing microblogging department of 200 employees responsible for technology, design, operations, and marketing.[19]

Sina executives invited and persuaded many Chinese celebrities to join the platform. The users of Sina Weibo include Asian celebrities, movie stars, singers, famous business and media figures, athletes, scholars, artists, organizations, religious figures, government departments, and officials from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Macau,[10][11][20][21] as well as some famous foreign individuals and organizations, including Kevin Rudd,[22] Boris Johnson,[23] David Cameron,[24] Narendra Modi,[25] Toshiba,[26] and the German national football team.[27] Like Twitter, Sina Weibo has a verification program for known people and organizations. Once an account is verified, a verification badge is added beside the account name.

Features

Sina Weibo implements many features from Twitter. A user may post with a 140-character limit, mention or talk to other people using "@UserName" formatting, add hashtags with "#HashName#" formatting, follow other users to make their posts appear in one's own timeline, re-post with "//@UserName" similar to Twitter's retweet function "RT @UserName", select posts for one's favorites list, and verify the account if the user is a celebrity. URLs are automatically shortened using the domain name t.cn like Twitter's t.co. Official and third-party applications make users able to access Sina Weibo from other websites or platforms. In January 2016, Sina Weibo decided to remove the 140-character limit for any original posts, and the users were thereby allowed to post with up to 2000 characters, while the 140-character limit was still applicable to re-posts and comments.[28]

Hashtags differ slightly, using a double-hashtag "#HashName#" method, since the lack of spacing between Chinese characters necessitates a closing tag.

Additionally, users are allowed to insert graphical emoticons or attach own image, music, video files in every post. Comments to a post can be shown as a list right below the post, the commenter can also choose whether to re-post the comment, quoting the whole original post, to commenter's own page.

Unregistered users can only browse a few posts by verified accounts. Neither unverified account pages nor comments to the posts by verified accounts are accessible to unregistered users.

Verification

Sina Weibo has an identification policy. It is like Twitter's verified account which could verify the identity of famous person, organization and so on. Once a user gets through the verification on the internet, a colorful V will be added behind their username. An orange V is for people while a blue one is for organizations and companies. Also there will be a graph and a declaration on its user page to show the verification. There are several kinds of verifications: personal verification, college verification, organization verification, verification for official accounts (accounts of government departments, social media platforms and famous companies) weibo master (people bind the accounts with their phone numbers and their followers). When the number of microblogs reach the threshold, they can apply the verification of "weibo master".

Clients

Sina produced mobile applications for various platforms to access Sina Weibo, the platforms include Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.

Sina also released a desktop client for Microsoft Windows under the product name of Weibo Desktop.[29]

International versions

Sina Weibo is available in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. The site also has versions[30] catering to users from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Weibo is now developing its international version in English and other languages. On 9 January, Sina Weibo created a partial English Version, most likely being a test run, but was soon taken down in a week.

Sina Weibo's official iPhone and iPad application have English language options.

Other services

Weilingdi (微领地, literally, micro fief) is another service bundled with Weibo that is similar to Foursquare, a location-based social networking website based on software for mobile devices, and which grew out of Sina's 2011 joint venture with GeoSentric's GyPSii.[31] Sina's Tuding (图钉) photo-sharing service, similar to Instagram, is also produced by the same joint venture. In addition, Sina Lady Weibo (新浪女性微博) is another service, which specializes in women's interests. Sina weibo have also recently released a desktop version of weibo, available for free download at its website.

Censorship

In cooperation with internet censorship in China, Sina sets strict controls over the posts on its services.[32][33] Posts with links using some URL shortening services (including Google's goo.gl), or containing blacklisted keywords,[34] are not allowed on Sina Weibo. Posts on politically sensitive topics are deleted after manual checking.[35]

Sina Weibo is believed to employ a distributed, heterogeneous strategy for censorship that has a great amount of defense-in-depth, which ranges from keyword list filtering to individual user monitoring. Nearly 30% of the total deletion events occur within 5–30 minutes, and nearly 90% of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours.[36]

On 9 March 2010, the posts by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei at Sina Weibo to appeal for information on 2008 Sichuan earthquake going public were deleted and his account was closed by website's administrator. Attempts to register accounts with usernames alluding to Ai Weiwei were blocked.[37] On 30 March 2010, Hong Kong singer Gigi Leung blogged about the jailed Zhao Lianhai, an activist and father to a 2008 Chinese milk scandal victim. The post was later deleted by an administrator.[38]

However compared to other Chinese media formats, Weibo services are seen as allowing greater freedom of speech.[10][39] Criticism against the Chinese government is more widespread on Sina Weibo and other weibo services. After the July 2011 Wenzhou train collision, many dissatisfied posts concerning governmental corruption were posted throughout the Sina Weibo.[40]

While Weibo services might not always be in favor of government officials, many Chinese officials opened Weibo accounts as to give their own version of events.[20]

On 16 March 2012, all the Beijing users of Sina Weibo were told to register with their real names.[41]

From 31 March 2012, the comment function of Sina Weibo was shut down for three days, along with Tencent QQ.[42][43]

In May 2012, Sina Weibo introduced new restrictions on the content its 300 million users can post.[44]

An example of Sina Weibo's censorship and manipulation of discussion or public social activity was the blocking of Foxconn workers' strikes in October 2012.[45]

On 4 June 2013, Sina Weibo had blocked the terms "Today", "Tonight", "June 4", and "Big Yellow Duck". If these were searched, a message would appear stating that according to relevant laws, statutes and policies, the results of the search couldn't be shown. The censorship occurred because of a photoshopped version of Tank Man, which swapped all tanks with the sculpture Rubber Duck, had been circulating around Twitter.[46][47]

According to BBC news report,Weibo users drop-off since 2014 can be attributed to both government crackdown that Chinese government regulations on preventing the use of aliases to create accounts and the rising threat from competitor Wechat.[48]

Promotions

Livery Airplane

On 8 June 2011, Tianjin Airlines unveiled an Embraer E-190 jet in special Sina Weibo livery and named it "Sina Weibo plane" (新浪微博号). It is the first commercial airplane to be named after a website in China.[49]

Villarreal CF

In January 2012, Sina weibo also announced that they would be sponsoring Spanish football club Villarreal CF in its match with FC Barcelona, to increase its fanbase in China.[50]

Statistics

As of 8 January 2016,[51] the following ten individuals and organizations managed the most popular accounts (name handle in parentheses) and the number of followers:

  1. Chen Kun (chenkun): 78,962,639
  2. Yao Chen (yaochen): 78,672,165
  3. Xie Na (xiena): 76,980,599
  4. Zhao Wei (zhaowei): 76,626,390
  5. He Jiong (hejiong):74,228,394
  6. Angelababy (realangelababy):68,807,226
  7. Ruby Lin (linxinru): 66,220,985
  8. Amy Cheung (iamamycheung): 63,640,883
  9. Guo Degang (guodegang):63,449,972
  10. Jimmy Lin (dreamerjimmy): 62,914,622

As of 8 January 2016,

  1. Sun Li (actress) (turbosun):29,339,276
  2. Zhang Ziyi (稀土部队):24,241,769
  3. Faye Wong (veggieg):24,113,499
  4. Li Yapeng (一号立井):15,221,291

Record messages

On 13 September 2013, the unverified handle "veggieg" (widely believed to be Faye Wong) posted a message suggesting that she had divorced her husband. The message was commented and re-posted more than a million times in four hours. The record was broken on 31 March 2014 by Wen Zhang, who posted a long apology admitting extramarital affair when his wife Ma Yili was pregnant with their second child. This message was commented and re-posted more than 2.5 million times in 10 hours. (Ma's response also generated 2.18 million responses in 12 hours.)[52] On 22 June TFBOYS member Wang Junkai was awarded a Guinness world record title for the most reposts of a Weibo post. His message was reposted 42,776,438 times.[53] Luhan was awarded a Guinness World record for most comments on a Weibo post.[54]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Weibo.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 31 March 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 Michelle and Uking (2 March 2011). "Special: Micro blog's macro impact". China Daily. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  3. ↑ Rapoza, Kenneth (17 May 2011). "China's Weibos vs US's Twitter: And the Winner Is?". Forbes. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
  4. ↑ Josh Ong (21 February 2013). "China's Sina Weibo grew 73% in 2012, passing 500 million registered accounts". thenextweb.com. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
  5. ↑ "Sina Weibo revenue and statistics - App Industry Insights". Business of Apps. Retrieved 2016-04-09.
  6. ↑ Cao, Belinda (28 February 2012). "Sina's Weibo Outlook Buoys Internet Stock Gains: China Overnight". Bloomberg.
  7. ↑ "Sina Weibo, 'China's Twitter,' files for IPO". Hindustan Times. Agence France-Presse. 15 March 2014. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  8. ↑ Joe Cornell (14 April 2014). "Spin-Offs in the Spotlight: The 'Spin-Cycle'". Forbes. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  9. ↑ Patrick M. Sheridan (17 April 2014). "Weibo IPO leads Chinese stock invasion". CNN. Retrieved 17 April 2014.
  10. 1 2 3 Ramzy, Austin (21 April 2011). "Charles Chao – The 2011 TIME 100". Time. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  11. 1 2 Epstein, Gady (14 March 2011). "Sina Weibo". Forbes Asia. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  12. ↑ 新浪微博恢复访问 发布故障致歉声明 (in Chinese). Sina Tech. 1 December 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  13. ↑ 新浪发布2010年四季及全年财报 微博用户数过亿 (in Chinese). Sina Tech. 2 March 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  14. ↑ "新浪微博今日启用weibo.com域名 同步更换标识" (in Chinese). Sina Tech. 7 April 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  15. ↑ Owen Fletcher (9 June 2011). "新浪英文微博 挑战Twitter？". The Wall Street Journal (in Chinese). Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  16. ↑ Kang, Xiaoxiao (3 May 2013). "Alibaba buys into Sina Weibo with $586 mln". Morning Whistle. Retrieved 10 May 2013.
  17. ↑ Russell Flannery (7 May 2014). "As Alibaba Basked in Attention, Shares in Its Social Media Arm Weibo Tanked Yesterday". Forbes. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  18. ↑ "Sina Commands 56% of China's Microblog Market". iResearch. 30 March 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  19. ↑ MarketWatch, Caixin, Sina's microblogging power, 4 July 2010
  20. 1 2 "Weibo Microblogs – A Western format with new Chinese implications". Thinking Chinese. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  21. ↑ Erenlai, Microblogs with Macro Reach: Spirituality Online In China, 31 October 2011
  22. ↑ Kevin Rudd joins Weibo, attracts 100,000 followers within three days, 23 April 2012
  23. ↑ Get Connected: Why Are Foreign Dignitaries Increasingly Turning to Weibo?, 23 May 2012
  24. ↑ Zhang, Qiang (2 December 2013). "David Cameron joins Chinese social site Weibo". BBC News.
  25. ↑ Wong, Tessa (4 May 2015). "Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joins China's Weibo". BBC News.
  26. ↑ (Chinese) 东芝泰格新浪官方微博正式开通 – Official opening of Toshiba's Sina Weibo account Toshiba China Official site
  27. ↑ Germany Football Team, starcount.com
  28. ↑ "新浪微博将取消140字限制 最多可发布2000字内容-新华网". news.xinhuanet.com. Retrieved 2016-11-09.
  29. ↑ 微博桌面2012 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿. Desktop.weibo.com (1 July 2013). Retrieved 9 August 2013.
  30. ↑ Sina Segmenting Weibo Usage with Multiple Versions.China Internet Watch. 17 Apr 2013
  31. ↑ "Geosentric Oyj Signs Agreement to Create Joint Venture with Sina Corporation". Reuters. 27 June 2011. Retrieved 1 June 2013.
  32. ↑ "China's Sina to step-up censorship of Weibo". Reuters. 19 September 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2011.
  33. ↑ "Beijing's Weibo Conundrum". The Wall Street Journal. 21 September 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2011.
  34. ↑ "新浪微博搜索禁词". China Digital Times. 7 July 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2011.
  35. ↑ "Radiohead enters censored world of Chinese social media". Global Post. 3 July 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2011.
  36. ↑ Zhu, Tao; Phipps, Pridgen; Crandall, Wallach. "The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions". arXiv:1303.0597Freely accessible.
  37. ↑ "著名艺术家艾未未挑战新浪微博的网络审查". Boxun.com. 10 March 2010. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
  38. ↑ "遭勒令刪去內地微博文章 撐維權爸爸 貼文抱不平 梁詠琪被河蟹了". Apple Daily. 1 April 2010. Retrieved 1 April 2010. Video News
  39. ↑ "Adrian Rauchfleisch/Mike S. Schäfer: Multiple Public Spheres of Weibo. a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China". [Information, Communication & Society (DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2014.940364)]. 24 July 2014. Retrieved 3 September 2014.
  40. ↑ The Wenzhou Crash and the Future of Weibo, Penn Olson – The Asian Tech Catalog, 1 August 2011
  41. ↑ "China's Sina Weibo microblog nears identity deadline". BBC News. 12 March 2012.
  42. ↑ Johnson, Ian (31 March 2012). "Coup Rumors Spur China to Hem in Social Networking Sites". The New York Times.
  43. ↑ "China: Microblog Commenting Restored". The New York Times. 4 April 2012.
  44. ↑ New restrictions on blogging site. Rthk.hk (29 May 2012). Retrieved 9 August 2013.
  45. ↑ Twitter / jniccolai: Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. Twitter. Retrieved 9 August 2013.
  46. ↑ "Censored in China: 'Today,' 'Tonight' and 'Big Yellow Duck'". The New York Times. 4 June 2013.
  47. ↑ Twitter / RichardBuangan: Chinese netizens 1, Chinese. Twitter. Retrieved 9 August 2013.
  48. ↑ "Is Weibo on the way out?". BBC news. 24 February 2015.
  49. ↑ "新浪微博号彩绘飞机亮相".
  50. ↑ "Villarreal Features Sina Weibo Sponsorship Against Barcelona".
  51. ↑ 风云人气榜-风云榜-新浪微博 (in Chinese). 26 July 2014. Retrieved 26 July 2014.
  52. ↑ 文章道歉声明刷新微博互动记录 (in Chinese). 7 March 2014. Retrieved 1 April 2014.
  53. ↑ "TFBoys star Wang Junkai sets social media record as millions repost Weibo update". Retrieved 9 August 2015.
  54. ↑ "Asian star LUHAN sets the record for most comments on a Weibo post". Retrieved 7 October 2015.
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