China’s Sina Goes With Weibo.com For Its “Twitter” Product

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According to china.org.cn,  China’s Sina Corp’s which runs one of China’s biggest web portals, just reveled the new domain name of its “Twitter” like microblogging service and its:

Weibo.com.

Sina started its microblog service in August 2009,and has more than 100 million users.

“It’s a milestone for Sina Weibo,” said Sina president and CEO Charles Chao, adding that the company will continue to invest heavily in microblogging services.

“The launch of weibo.com was advertised in an unprecedented way Thursday with depictions of online embedded ads printed on the frontpages of major metropolitan newspapers across the country. People have even collected Thursday’s Beijing Times to commemorate the launch of Weibo.”

“According to Google trends, a tool indicating online searching frequency and popularity, the flow rate of Sina Weibo has already surpassed those of homepages of Sohu and Netease, and it is also approaching the click rates of Tencent and Sina. The four websites are all major Chinese Internet portals.

“Though dubbed as “China’s Twitter,” Charles Chao denied Weibo copied the model of its western counterparts, arguing that “the evolution of Chinese social media will be different from Twitter or Facebook, as Weibo features high interactivity.”

Personally I hate the domain.

Unless it has some special meaning in China as its going to get confused with webio.com a better domain registered since, 1999 or webo.com a domain registered since 1996.

Neither Webio.com nor Webo.com seem to be in use and you have to wonder if Sina even though to acquire either or both of those domains before announcing its weibo.com product.

Sina.com is a publicly traded company.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  2. TheBigLieSociety says

    Rep. Cliff Stearns, Chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, deliver opening keynote remarks at the Free State Foundation’s April 12, 2011, Lunch Seminar

  3. sget88 says

    Weibo literally means ‘microblog’. Obtaining Weibo.com is akin to getting hold of ‘blog.com’ – a premium domain name.

    The Chinese use a stringent transliteration system (hanyu pinyin) – it is uniform for the overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers, and it is unlikely that users would end up at a typo that often.

    While your views are completely reasonable for someone who does not speak the language, Sina has pretty good reason for being satisfied with just that one domain name.

  5. Shaun Morton says

    “Unless it has some special meaning in China as its going to get confused with webio.com a better domain registered since, 1999 or webo.com a domain registered since 1996.”

    “Weibo” translates into “microblog” in Chinese.

  6. Domain Development says

    I guess I’m not the only one here that speaks Chinese 🙂 It’s Chinese pinyin and ‘Microblog’ is correct. It wouldn’t be good for English speakers, but I know they will never offer an English version on that site, or they would risk being blocked in China by their own government.

    @BigLieSociety What the hell are you talking about?

    Anthony

  7. Shane Cultra says

    @Anthony. You are the only guy with blonde hair that speaks it here, I can guarantee that. 🙂 PS I have Weeba.com does that translate into something? I was hoping it meant Facebook in pinyin

  8. Domain Development says

    Hehehe, I’m a redhead, for the record. Weeba is very close to a Chinese word, Weiba, which means tail. That would be valuable. I just checked and the .org is available. But Chinese users really just use .com, .cn, and .com.cn, and to a lesser degree, .net. Anything else is probably like .ws to us.

  11. MHB says

    Big

    FYI

    I was the one who sold MyFlorida.com to the state, but you probably knew that already.

  12. MHB says

    Domain

    SO I get offers every week from Asia on two domains I own (besides NNN.com domains) so although I don’t know what the deal is, I know enough to quote offers only in the six figures.

    Can you shed any light on:

    juwan.com

    aili.com

  14. Domain Development says

    Juwan isn’t a word in Chinese, but Ju and Wan are both words in pinyin. They can mean different things depending on the character they are representing. But the most common character representing by Ju is “Giant” and Wan would be “10,000” or “many” I’m guessing the interest in it is to create a brand name on it.

    Aili has a lot more going there. Aili also is not a word but Ai definitely represents love (in verb or noun form) and li could mean different things, the most common being profit, it also means pears.

    So aili.com could stand for “love profit” or “love pears”

  16. Anunt says

    The stock SINA is still a great buy here. You will definately make much more money buying SINA stock than buying domains right now. Check out the chart for SINA. It just keeps going higher and higher. It’s still NOT too late to jump in.

    Good Luck!