WEIBO POPUPS

I know I have already written a lot about the Chinese version twitter—Weibo, and it seems that I just focused on describing some detailed designs of Weibo and did not paid much attention to the compare and contrast of Weibo and Twitter. It is quite random and not systematic or academic. I know, but I cannot stop myself. Every time I see a tiny different thing on Weibo from Twitter or some smart design or some changes or improvement, I want to talk about it.

So this time, I’m going to talk about some activities or topics conducted by the Weibo company (SINA) which are showed on every user’s first page when they log onto their accounts. After changing users’ interfaces forcedly, Weibo started a new way to diffuse its everyday topics—as you log onto your Weibo account, the first thing you will see is a popup including the today’s hot topic which invites you to join this topic by clicking the button on the right bottom. And the topics are managed similar as Twitter—just putting the topic name between two # symbals. Just like what is shown in Figure 1.

If you choose you want to join, the button will lead you to the certain page, and if you cancel, there will be another popup showing in the screen which ask you whether you are sure to not receive this message the whole day (Figure 2). If you choose receive it later, then you will get this popup again later that day with other hot topics. Without dealing with these popups, you can do nothing with your weibo.

It might be a good way to enforce users paying attention to every day hot topics and get people involved. However, I do not like it. it makes me feel uncomfortable everyday morning I log on and the first thing I have to do is to click two buttons which is meaningless for my life. I think weibo should find out other ways to diffuse their products expect forcing their users.