What can the future do for you?
Lift works to identify and anticipate current and emerging usagesof digital technologies through research, events, publications and services.
Weibo 2.0
March 2, 2011 - 15:00 — Marc Laperrouza
Marc Laperrouza is a specialist of China with a focus on communications technologies. He publishes a weekly column titled "Time to look east" that you can also find on his blog.
Meet Weibo!
It is a Chinese version of Twitter - it literally means micro-blog - that expects around 150 million users by the end of 2011.
Helped by the diffusion of mobile phones with advanced features, the number of micro-bloggers in China is expected to grow extremely fast in the coming years thanks to the 10 million users joining every… month. Its top 100 users have a whopping 180 million of followers.
And Twitter in all of this? Well, like Facebook, it remains officially blocked for the time being in China, except for a handful of sophisticated users who can route around the firewall. That said, like with other web applications (e.g., search engines) the Chinese version looks very much like the original non-Chinese version but with added features that better match Chinese users’ needs - for instance, Chinese users tend to enjoy following celebrities’ micro-blogs.
My wish for micro-blogs? A service that translates them in the language of your choice.
Comments
Post new comment