Tracking China’s Twitter Twins

A growing number of Chinese microblogging sites are looking to leverage China’s huge domestic mobile phone and IM market.

Trend Description

San Francisco-based Twitter and its counterparts (Jaiku, Dodgeball, etc.) are the UGC phenomenon of the year. Asking the question “What are you doing?”, Twitter allows users from all over the world to share their thoughts and deeds in real-time on the web via SMS, IM or e-mail.

Predictably, China has now come up with an array of Twitter clones that greatly resemble their US cousins. Top of the popularity chart right now are Atnote and Popwu. Popwu even has an account on Twitter that links back to their site. Also popping up are blog sites such as Weazone and V2ex that have added Twitter-like features to their sites. Latest market entrants are Jiwai.de, Fanfou, LaiGuLa, iLaodao and Komoo.

Case Studies

Jiwai.de and Fanfou

Jiwai.de and Fanfou both have almost the same UI design as that of Twitter, and both of them translate Twitter’s famous “What are you doing?” directly into Chinese. They both support MSN and mobile SMS for updating and receiving messages - Jiwai.de also supports QQ which is a smart move as QQ is by far the most popular IM tool in China. Open API and blog widgets are provided too - Fanfou’s blog widget has an image version beside the javascript version because many Chinese blogging services do not allow users to add javascript in their blog sidebar.

Image source: Jiwai.de

Image source: Fanfou

LaiGuLa

LaiGuLa is another twitter player that just launched in China. Although the site is still in beta mode, LaiGuLa is clearly designed with the Twitter functionality and imagery. Users can locate friends via the search bar, and messages are limited to the standard 140 characters.

Image source: Laigula

Trend Impact

Many people think API is one essential ingredient missing from Chinese cyberspace (see Ogilvy China Digital Watch), but the situation is changing gradually. Chinese sites are slowly realizing that open APIs of popular Web 2.0 services are a necessary part of mashup creation, application-building and potential revenue generation. China’s Twitter-like sites, providing they secure the necessary VC funding, have the potential to be successful if they can capitalize on the China’s 440 million plus mobile phone users (and growing by 5 million a month) by monetizing SMS services.

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