One of the most prominent rivals of Twitter, which are just look-alike
Image via CrunchBaseservices, is a Chinese microblogs which has now decided to expend enough to add foreign languages to its site Chinese. It is definitely expected to begin from English language interface for the much-used iPhone app. The microblog, was released first by a Chinese news portal operator, Sina, back in the August of 2009. Since then it has accumulated up to a 100 million and above users data, which is almost the half users that Twitter has worldwide, which is a huge deal.
The company has just included the English language interface for its iPhone app just in the start of this month although much of its posts still remain in the Chinese language. It was however boasted by the C.E.O. of Sina, Charles Chao himself, that there are there are millions addicted users of the microblog which reside outside the mainland China. He also notified that these places beside China, where mostly users use the site include Hong Kong, Taiwan and North America. He also added afterwards that this new English interface is definitely intended to facilitate these users in foreign countries who already the microblog service, and add more.
Chao was speaking publicly after this release at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, which took place on this Wednesday, when he said that "Hopefully this product will be well-received in other countries." He also added that "We will probably introduce other languages in the future too." Regardless of the much unexpected success of microblog and its groth outide the boundaries of China, Sina still intends to keeps its main center of attention for making better services best used in China, Chao said. He then also gave justification when he said that such international expansion takes much more time, and will definitely come into order only after having reliable local partners.
China has a total of 457 million Web users, consequently making it one of the largest Internet market. And since foreign services like Twitter are blocked within the country due to the censorship of Chinese government, services like Sina have taken complete advantage of the situation and have become one of the largest Web services of the country. These Chinese authorities can be trusted with their decisions as they are very firm in regularly blocking any online content which is considered to be politically sensitive.
Hence, now the domestic companies, just like Sina, are facing a great competition amongst themselves for becoming the microblogging service of China. Other competitors for the same microblogging service include other companies like Tencent and Baidu.
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