Weibo is growing rapidly in China, according to latest news, weibo is targeting Euro country user along with English version.
Twitter claims to have 175 million accounts and Facebook claim to have 600 million users per month. Take a look at this article which was published end of March at Business Insider Twitter is not my friend at the moment as I got suspended. Another story!
Twitter is leading now because those chinna site is not really open market to Euro country, most of the users is from Chinna itself. Once upon a time, those giant company like yahoo, friendster, nokia also doing very well. Now....these companys is no longer high demand in market. Personally I feel that China product is very powerful.
Twitter grew from a "reach" of one percent of all internet users two years ago, to a reach of ten percent. That means one in ten of all the people online have visited the site recently.
I don't think that Twitter has anything to worry about at the moment. It's a different product than Facebook or Google+ as it's about instant communication. I wouldn't be worried about some copycat from China, I wouldn't want my conversations routed via some servers in China within easy reach of state censors.
I think Twitter's threat will come either from the site forgetting what people want out of it or a western-based service I'm based in China and I've watched Weibo rise. It is really cool but it's built with the China/Asian market in mind. It won't succeed in the West for the same reason that Yahoo, eBay and many other US services failed in China... the audience wants different things.
Those western is not perform in China, do you think is due to government control? or User really prefer local site like baidu and weibo? How about Google+ ? although the core player for social war is between Google and Facebook, do you think twitter will be impacted?
Hi Patrick0001, Sorry for the late reply. While Governments favoring home grown networks is a big part of the equation it's not really the main reason... online Chinese and Asian audiences are dramatically different to western ones... For example the predominant browser in China is still IE6 or a IE6-based local equivalent (sogu, 360 etc) That's because most of the operating systems here are pirated Windows XP and they don't want to risk the upgrade. Another example is the IM/Social networking tool QQ created by tencent... while the chat program, which is 'based on' AOL's ICQ is the center of the system it has gone in heavily for games, cute GIF graphics, cute icons and avatars that can be customized for money. Chinese like their stuff sparkly, complex and doing things. Many of the things we hate in the west (home pages with music playing, sparkly text, rolling text, drifting windows etc) are the norm here. As for Google + I don't know... there are a number of Chinese people using it but I don't know if it will be accepted by everybody and I don't know how long it will be before China blocks it completely, you already need a VPN to get access to it in some parts of China.
Weibo is, and will only remain good for Asian users only. Neither europeans, nor americans will go on weibo for sure.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that Europeans nor Americans will use Weibo... Tom Cruise has a weibo account as does many Shanghai-based expats. There are still Chinese twitter users too. I'd just say that it's not set up for the Western market.
Well said "smith", Weiboo will grow slowly in european market, it will take some to set up for the western market, but will not take much time to come up. As these types of websites grows rapidly within some period.
well no one can predict what could happen... but according to current statistics perhaps it could be.. but still not sure..
No chance. Twitter is here to stay. Later down the line it will probably get bought out by Facebook or Google, or worst case scenario Microsoft!