Weibo and Twitter Are Copying Each Other Again to Survive. Will It Win You Back?

The rise and fall of these two companies is, more or less, the story of how information spreads on the internet

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Twitter and Sina Weibo are now fellow sufferers.

Early last month, Twitter announced it would allow posts of up to 10,000 characters and drop its 140-character limit. A few days later, Weibo beat it to launch with the same feature, though with a cap of 2,000 characters.

This is not the first time the two have borrowed from each other. Twitter earlier lifted Weibo's way of displaying images and video, and Weibo's native ads bear Twitter's stamp.

So far, though, trading features has not stopped either company's decline.

Twitter's user activity has been falling for a year, and news of departing executives arrives regularly. Growing ad revenue has done little to restore the confidence of the market or shareholders: if users leave, the ads will not last.

Sina Weibo is not doing well either. Not long ago, a Weibo employee mocked Baidu Tieba, saying Weibo would never take money from hospitals. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei answered with some self-mockery: "Don't feel so morally superior. The only reason we don't have that problem is that scammers don't think we're worth their time yet."

Only a few years ago, Twitter and Sina Weibo were hailed as a media revolution that was changing how information flows through society.

Public messages of no more than 140 characters sharply lowered the barrier to writing, reading, sharing and discussing information, and more and more people became willing to try joining public debate.

In 2009, news of Iran's Green Revolution traveled almost entirely through Twitter; the company even rescheduled server maintenance so as not to disrupt events on the ground. In China, Sina Weibo for a time carried the Chinese public's hopes of having a voice.

Microblogging put the spreading of information in ordinary people's hands for the first time

From the internet's early days, information was big business. Yahoo, which pioneered the portal model, was for a long time the most-visited website in the world. In China, the three big portals, Sina, Sohu and NetEase, also became part of ordinary people's online lives.

But the portals did not change how information circulated. Professional news organizations still connected with their readers and the people they covered; the connection had simply moved from newspapers and television to portal websites.

That is why Twitter took off. It cut the cost of producing content to roughly the effort of writing two text messages. And because everyone's messages were public and equal, information no longer flowed from one to many but from many to many. As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey put it, Twitter was a kind of "public text messaging."

Besides the 140-character limit, three early features changed how information spread. Interestingly, users invented all three, not Twitter's own team:

• The "@" symbol, for conversation: freelancer Robert Andersen came up with it in 2006. The symbol, short for "at," had usually gone only in front of an address, but on Twitter it could be put in front of a user's ID, making it a public tool for talking to someone directly. In May 2007, Twitter officially adopted "@" as a conversation feature.
• "RT," for retweet: a term coined by early user Eric Rice, who would paste the original text of the message by hand after it. Even after Twitter added its own retweet button in 2009, some users kept typing RT manually.
• The hashtag "#," for topics: entrepreneur Chris Messina first used # to organize posts about conferences. In October 2007, during the San Diego wildfires, the tag #sandiegofire caught on, letting people around the world follow events there as they happened. Twitter did not officially support "#" until July 2009, and it became the basis of Twitter's trending topics and of its ad products.

In its early days, Twitter was mocked as a place where people posted what they had for breakfast and lunch, with more than 80% of its content dismissed as junk. Once these mechanisms were in place, it was no longer just a site for airing personal trivia in public; it had become a channel for breaking news.

Barack Obama, then still a presidential candidate, saw Twitter's reach as early as 2008 and became the first candidate to open a Twitter account to win votes.

In July 2009, minutes of Twitter's internal meetings leaked. In them, the company declared that it wanted to be the "Pulse of the Planet". The phrase was later used widely in commentary on and descriptions of Twitter.

Meanwhile, a crop of Twitter imitators sprang up in China. In 2009 and 2010, portals, startups and even government-linked agencies rushed out microblogging products, most of them functionally little different from Twitter.

Of these contenders, Sina Weibo, backed by China's largest news portal, was arguably the strongest. Besides copying Twitter's follow system, its way of displaying the feed, and its 140-character limit, Sina Weibo made a good number of changes for China. For example, it split information into two layers: the original post, and below it the comments and reposts, which either floated outside the original post's box or sat beneath it. It also let users post images, which could be enlarged right in the feed.

The reason was surely to make information easier to manage and to trace back to its source, and to stop anyone from altering the original, something Twitter later learned from Weibo as well. Unlike the openness and equality Twitter stressed in its early days, Sina Weibo was more like a miniature news website in 140 characters, except that each user now supplied the news.

Perhaps even more impressive was how Sina ran Weibo. In the early days, it reused the strategy it had used for Sina Blog: inviting celebrities and public figures to open microblogs, then verifying their real identities. Once verified, these celebrity accounts showed an orange "V" next to their names, a design borrowed from Twitter, whose badge is blue.

For a while, the way information spreads seemed about to change for good

For big media outlets, companies, and ordinary people who wanted attention, microblogging was once the main battleground.

From 2009 to 2012, microblogs enjoyed their best years. Sina Weibo, not yet 3 years old, passed 324 million registered users and held more than 87% of the Chinese market, while Twitter went from what looked like a niche product for geeks to the second-largest social network in the United States.

The speed at which news spread and was discussed on Twitter stunned even people in traditional media.

In 2009, when a plane made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, the first to report it was not CNN but a Twitter user called "manolantern."

He happened to be on a nearby boat when the plane came down, so he took a photo with his phone, uploaded it to Twitter and wrote just two sentences: "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy." The two short messages drew attention at once, and Twitter users posted updates in real time. The New York Times put a short news item on its website 15 minutes later, but within minutes the news of the crash had already spread around the world on Twitter.

Twitter transformed how content is produced. Journalists might no longer need to sit at their computers waiting for wire reports from the Associated Press or Reuters, because the news was right there on Twitter. Not just the reporting but the publishing, spreading and discussing of news all happened in an instant. Unmatched speed and a huge crowd of people discussing became Twitter's strengths, and both Iran's Green Revolution and the popular uprisings of the 2011 "Arab Spring" were directly tied to it.

Because it made reporting, passing on information and discussion open to anyone, and suited phones especially well, Twitter was seen as a platform with a brighter future than Facebook, the number-one network. It even put Facebook on the back foot in public opinion and in morale.

According to the book The Facebook Effect, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz worried at the time that "senior engineers would rather take jobs at Twitter than come to Facebook."

Sina Weibo, too, became for a while a public forum for ordinary Chinese people.

In 2011, after the Wenzhou high-speed train crash, the Nanchang Railway Bureau was the first to post updates on the investigation and response on Weibo. By the third day after the crash, there were already 4.58 million Weibo posts on the subject.

During the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the government was criticized for not being open and transparent with information. After the train crash, by contrast, Weibo users "gathering to watch" on social media forced government departments to communicate directly with the public about public affairs. Whether or not anything fundamental changed, at least information about public events became a little more transparent.

This short, fast and open way of spreading information also turned microblogging into a cultural phenomenon. Short attention spans, fragmented reading, restlessness, and the return of long-form reading became hot topics in those years.

But tech companies came back, and figured out how to do news

But the way information spreads keeps changing. Just as Twitter and Sina Weibo were at their peak, a new wave of closed services for sharing information returned to center stage. We mean instant messaging apps such as Facebook, WeChat and LINE.

What set these newly rising companies apart from Twitter and Weibo was that, through real names or scanning the phone's address book, they captured users' real-life social relationships directly.

These messaging apps spread virally. WeChat, launched in January 2011, passed 200 million users in just 14 months.

With huge user bases, these products did not stop at being "a chat tool." Like Twitter and other microblogs, they set out to capture users' appetite for information beyond chatting.

Take WeChat. Its Moments feature launched in April 2012 and became a channel for sharing photos of users' lives, something like Sina Weibo but lighter. In August 2012, WeChat introduced official accounts, turning a chat tool into a tool for producing, reading and sharing information.

By the end of 2014, according to figures released by Tencent, users were reading an average of 5.86 articles a day on WeChat. Eighty percent of reads of subscription accounts came through Moments, and there were already 8 million official accounts.

By comparison, microblogs like Twitter had few strengths beyond the speed at which information spread: they offered no strong ties between people, and as open platforms they did not require users to provide much verified personal information. Worse still, even their speed advantage was shrinking.

Journalists and other professionals in the business of spreading information were not what they had been. They understood Twitter's speed, could publish a solid news report quickly, and knew how to use social networks to steer attention to their own websites.

Twitter-style short news items were no longer seen as a form that would cut off news organizations' lifeblood. The further they developed, the more they looked like just another media channel.

Meanwhile, Facebook's algorithmically ranked feed, which blended news with personal updates (think of it as a better-looking Sina Weibo feed full of news and friends' photos), was slowly winning more of users' clicks.

Meanwhile, two companies eager to make money botched it

After its early innovations, Twitter's product barely moved forward. Even the ability to attach a picture to a tweet did not officially arrive until 2011.

What investors could tolerate even less was its sluggish progress on an advertising system and a business model. This was one reason the company pushed out its second CEO, Evan Williams, in 2010.

His successor, Dick Costolo, did not launch an automated ad system until 2012. A year after it went live, under the short-term pressure and prodding of investors, Twitter went public, as it was always going to.

Things got worse after the IPO. Driven along by the capital markets, Twitter produced no new ideas in how information or media spread. Dick Costolo, who had started out as a performer, steered the product toward being TV's "second screen" to raise activity on Twitter and win over advertisers.

As a result, user activity rose and fell with TV programming, and only during events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, when TV audiences peak, did Twitter have numbers worth showing off.

Sina Weibo made money even more clumsily. At first, because everyone was on microblogs, brands and companies quickly made Sina Weibo their new marketing battleground. But for a long time, neither these companies and advertisers nor Sina Weibo itself worked out how to measure the real advertising value of Weibo users.

So they took the crudest approach. Brands and PR firms simply treated follower counts, reposts and comments as the yardstick of how much buzz a microblog generated. Then we started seeing more and more fake followers and paid posters.

In June 2012, Weibo launched paid memberships, which did little for the product or for other users. In April 2013, after Alibaba Group announced it would buy a stake in Weibo, Weibo still could not make sure ads reached only the right people. Taobao shops and WeChat sellers flooded the platform and spoiled the experience for users.

And so both microblogging products, each through its own mistakes, missed new chances to grow fast.

Before Twitter went public, investor Marc Andreessen still believed Facebook had to beware of being disrupted by Twitter. Today that worry looks somewhat overblown.

Companies that use technology to build media products have become the mainstream instead

Meanwhile, tech companies like Facebook, WeChat and Toutiao caught up quickly once they figured out how to recommend news.

From 2006, Facebook began experimenting with re-ranking its feed, which it called the News Feed. In 2008 it opened its platform so that news sites could let users log in with their Facebook accounts, and users' comments on stories could be posted straight to their Facebook News Feed. It later launched Paper, a news aggregation app, and Instant Articles, a service built to distribute content for media outlets.

While Twitter was still waiting for users to build a good-looking feed for themselves, Facebook was already doing it for them with algorithms and data. That is also why Facebook's monthly users kept growing, reaching 1.55 billion by 2014, while Twitter had only a fifth as many, and its number was still falling.

In China, WeChat, which grew out of Tencent's email team and likewise stands for the closed social network, became the largest platform for gathering media content. The 8 million official accounts on its Official Accounts Platform also became the way ordinary smartphone users consume news and information.

While WeChat used strong social ties to drive traffic to content, another Chinese company, Toutiao, used the largest pool of news sources and a recommendation algorithm to convince ordinary users that its app was all they needed.

Each in its own way, these two products replaced Sina Weibo: official accounts and independent writers replaced Weibo's grassroots big accounts, while Toutiao replaced the accounts of news organizations, because its algorithm lines up the news you are likely to care about.

And "microblogging," which once stood for openness and publicness and held a grander vision of information and media, now looks more and more like just a distribution channel for media content.

Cover image source: Visual China Group