Sina Weibo, the “Chinese Twitter” to compete against Twitter

It looks like Twitter could have a serious competitor on the horizon – or maybe not. Sina Weibo, China’s own version of Twitter has announced its plans to make its microblogging service available in English within the next two to three months. Sina Weibo, the “Chinese Twitter”, was created in response to Twitter being banned in China and has over 140 million users (Twitter has over 200 million users). Both services are similar, in the sense that they’re both microblogging services that are accessible from multiple platforms, however Sina Weibo isn’t banned in China due to the fact it practices government-mandated censorship.

But seeing how 91.1% of its traffic comes from China, it looks like the Chinese people don’t really care about Sina Weibo’s censorship policies. Maybe it might change its rules/policies with the new version of the service – if it wants to compete against Twitter, that’s probably one of the major obstacles it will need to overcome. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted. How many of you have tried Sina Weibo, and what do you think of the service?