After China's most popular miniblog Fanfou being shut down in June, 2009, web portal company Sina started its miniblog service 新浪微博(sina wei bo) in September 2009. Similar to its market strategy of blog service, the company is trying to attract more users by inviting the popular celebrities to use the service.
Miniblog users on Sina are classified into two categories with slight but significant difference. The user ID followed by a letter "V" indicates (a) the user is a public figure or (b) the user has registered his/her identity with the company(surely will help the company to control and censor information)(former policy, now disappeared in help document). The worst thing of the classification is, information posted by users without letter "V" is only accessible to Sina users, the messages could not be seen, or subscribed to without logging in, in other words, such "Web 2.0 information sharing" application is limited in a certain range. Is it the strategy that the company is using to encourage users to authenticate their real names with the website? Or, attracting more new users because they are unable to read their friends' messages without registering. Anyway, the true value of miniblog service is largely underestimated and reduced.
Another ridiculous characteristic is, the system have generated and is still generating "ghost users", mostly with no display picture, posted nothing or very few messages, following exactly 30 users or so. It seems that sina tries to encourage the non-V users by giving them followers, or at least, displaying a satisfied number of followers instead of a poor but real number. Who wants so many FAKE followers?
Though sina's miniblog is definitely cloning from Twitter, it offers better user experience in commenting and forwarding. Comments are posted directly after the original message and users can also publish the comment as a new message followed by the original post. However, that's the only advantage I have discovered so far.
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