Weibo & Twitter I

Yesterday the presentation about macroblog was quite good and the class activity on TweetChat was funny. I do not use twitter very often and this was the first time I knew about TweetChat. But I often use Weibo—the Chinese version twitter and I’m quite sure there is a similar function in Weibo just like TweetChat. 

So this makes me wandering whether I can do a comparison between Twitter and Weibo, not that academic and serious, just from my using experiences. And I’m sure this comparison should be funny since Weibo is the copy of Twitter but also has some unique features which adapt to the requirements of Chinese users. I’m quite sure this comparison may take me several times and might be some kind of random. So I named this first post on the comparison “Weibo & Twitter I” since there should be the second one, the third one in the future.

OK, let’s back to the TweetChat. I checked my Weibo account after class and found there really is a function similar with TweetChat which named as WeiTopic. But there is not a particular website for this WeiTopic. We have to logon to the page from the Weibo homepage. The homepage of WeiTopic is like the picture below.

 

As you can see, there are lots of topics listed on the homepage and they have been classified into different types. Besides the topic you can see a small tag like “new” or ”hot” which identify it as a new topic or a hot topic. You can choose one topic as your favorite, click that topic and tweet on it. The topic tag will add to your tweet automatically. What’s more, you can create your own topic by just adding your topic name into the middle of “##”, such as “#My Favorite#”.

However, I also find a disadvantage in WeiTopic—I cannot find an easy way to search a topic since there is no search engine for WeiTopic like in TweetChat. As a result, there is no particular page for all the tweets on the particular topic like the discussion page showing all of our tweets on CPR590 in our class. So there might be an aspect Weibo need to inprove.