Web Services for Chinese Blog and Twitter

In the past couple months I have spent many hours and effort to write Chinese blogs and twitters. Chinese is my mother language so it is natural for me to write. I know there are many web services to provide features and services specially for Chinese years ago. I even registered my account in two most popular ones, creaders.net and sina.com. However, I have spent rarely much time there. The main reason to switch my attention to those Chinese web sites was the time I went back to China last Christmas time vacation.

One thing got my attention is that almost every one in China with mobile phones have QQ. QQ becomes an alternative way to communicate. QQ's provider is a company called Tencent. Like Google and Twitter, QQ was started as a hobby app for people to communicate based on MSN text message. Soon it got Chinese people attention, and it spread out allover China. With so much people on QQ everyday, now Tencent have already attract many investors and it has been doing very well financially as well.

When I was surprised by Tencent success, I was told that Tencent was actually losing market in the blogger and twitter services in Chinese. Sina was and now is the biggest blog and twitter, or weibo in Chinese, in China. Since I already had account at Sina, I gave it a try when I was in China. I have continued my blog and weibo since then. The market is so hot there. I see that many famous people like celebrities, politicians, economic scholars, popular public speakers, naming just a few of types of people, have millions followers. Each time when they post any blog, news or a phrase, they reach to people instantly. Several times of comments, forwards, and favourites happen afterwards. I was joke to one CNet tech person, who is very active in new tech review and podcasts. I told her that if she was in weibo, she would have 100 times of followers. Unfortunately, none of western hot-people know Chinese.

Anyway, the reason I write my Chinese blogs and weibos are my exploration of web in this global environment. Now the English is not dominate language on the web. Actually, if you know another or more languages, you have great advantages over other people. For example, my weibo followers are about 55, while my twitter (@chudq) has only 18. The visits to my sina blog up to today are 2494, creaders blog are 8174. I have my principle to join those services, not just to attract people or pursue number of followers. I want to write my own idea, experience and tips, in one word: sharing. The followers are actually the people have the similar interest.

In terms of features, all Chinese web services are pretty good. For example, all Chinese blog web providers have nice editors with tones of tools for layout format. One most nice feature is HTML source code editing. I can almost write any HTML codes in my blog. This makes my control much easier. Weibo is similar as twitter. You can forward tweet, comment tweet, and group your followers. You can write private messages. The most popular feature is to add pictures and videos with tweet.



As you can see, pictures worth thousand words. With this feature, you can do your message more effectively. There are so much there. Most westerns don't know what is happening in Chinese Web services. Many webs are blocked and that's reality. However, in terms of freedom and dynamics, people are more active and I can see that Chinese people are very happy with what they have now. The media is not the correct picture. Personally speaking, I think western media give westerns wrong picture about China.