NFL is first to stream live sports on a key Chinese social network

If you enjoy Twitter's live NFL games, you might just feel jealous very shortly. The NFL has struck a deal that will make it the first sports league to livestream on Sina Weibo, one of China's largest social networks. The service has already streamed...

Study finds that anger spreads further than joy on social networks

Study finds that anger spreads further than joy on social networks

Want to get your message heard on a social network? Try raging about it. China's Beihang University has published a study of Sina Weibo users which suggests that anger-fueled online posts have more of an influence than those reflecting other emotions. During the research period, a typical bitter comment would affect posts three degrees removed from the original; joy had a muted impact, while disgust and sadness hardly got any traction. Don't be too quick to lament the human condition, though. As researchers note, many of the angry posts were triggered by politics in Weibo's native China. There's a chance that internet denizens on other social networks have a rosier outlook on life.

[Image credit: Wayne Marshall, Flickr]

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Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: Cornell University Library

Hell freezes over: Sina Weibo now lets you post to Facebook

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For some strange reason, Sina Weibo's always required folks to log in to view some of its posts, but now there's more incentive for those who've yet to open a Weibo account. Announced yesterday, the website claims to be the first Chinese social networking platform to connect with Facebook -- the irony being the latter is still blocked in China, plus Tencent's WeChat already beat Weibo on this one.

Anyhow, both new and existing overseas users (including those from Taiwan and Hong Kong) can now register their Facebook accounts on Weibo, thus letting them post Weibo messages to the former simultaneously. Understandably, it doesn't work the other way round, but this should still somewhat help Weibo expand its user base of over 530 million.

As you can see in the above screenshots, this author took the new feature for a test drive and could only forward text-only Weibo posts to Facebook. That said, Sina's press release states that through Facebook's Graph API, Weibo users will eventually be able to also share images, videos, TV shows, music and mobile location to Zuckerberg World. For now, this Facebook integration is only available on the web client, but the Android and iOS clients will soon receive it as well. We've reached out to Sina to see what's up with the Windows Phone version, so stay tuned.

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Via: The Next Web, Engadget Chinese

Source: Sina Digital (Chinese)

Sina Weibo passes 500 million user mark, how’s your site coming along?

Sina Weibo passes 500 million user mark, how's your site coming along

Remember those halcyon days last November when Sina Weibo passed more than 400 million users? Well, a mere three months later, and the microblogging site can now boast that it's got 503 million compulsive over-sharers. To put that figure into perspective, were "Chinese Twitter" to be its own country, it would be the third most populous nation on Earth. While it should be celebrating such figures, there's a few signs of trouble on the horizon, as local rival Tencent's WeChat hit 300 million users last month -- not to mention some disgruntled former users inviting people to switch to Twitter.

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Tech In Asia, (2)

Kai-Fu Lee defies ban, invites 30 million Weibo followers to join him on Twitter

KaiFu Lee defies ban, invites 30 million Weibo followers to join him on Twitter

Think you're brave, internet tough guy? Ex-Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee's been rather outspoken about censorship in his homeland, and as such was banned from Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days, presumably by over-zealous authorities. To keep his followers in the strictly monitored nation up-to-date, the Beijing-based Lee took to Twitter and invited all 30 million of them to join him, which would make him the social network's fourth most-followed user. That's unlikely, of course -- Twitter can be accessed fairly easily despite a ban in the nation, but developing a country-sized following on an illicit site would be a stretch, even for an outspoken pundit.

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Via: The Telegraph

Source: Kai-Fu Lee (Twitter, translated)

Sina Weibo exceeds 400 million users, sees increasing mobile traffic

Sina Weibo exceeds 400 million users, sees increasing mobile traffic

Microblogging site Sina Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, reported a pretty dazzling statistic in its third quarter results: it now boasts over 400 million registered users. We can't be sure how many are active, of course, but it's still a vast number considering appeal is localized to the People's Republic. It also means Sina is winning the popularity contest with social media competitor Tencent, although it humbly acknowledges their services are somewhat different. The company's platform is still evolving, and it's only recently seen mobile usage exceed computers, so is shifting product focus accordingly. Sina's obviously doing something right, and that suits us just fine -- keep those news bites and juicy leaks coming.

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Sina Weibo exceeds 400 million users, sees increasing mobile traffic originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceSina  | Email this | Comments

China Mobile’s Lumia 920T packs a Snapdragon S4 Pro, better graphics performance

China Mobile's Lumia 920T packs a Snapdragon S4 Pro, better graphics performance

Buying a shiny new flagship and finding out international variants are tricked out better than yours is never much fun. Well, China Mobile has Weiboed (is that right?) that its Lumia 920T variant will pack the Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC (MSM8960T), and not the S4 Plus in the regular 920. The Pro carries the same basic CPU, and while it's not known whether the 920T will use the full 1.7GHz available (the 920's runs at 1.5GHz), the major difference is a bump from the Adreno 225 GPU to the more powerful Adreno 320. It cleaned up in the GLBenchmark tests we ran on the LG Optimus G (albeit with a quad-core CPU), but is Windows Phone 8 ready to use all that hardware -- or, more politely, will it make any difference to the user? With graphic-intensive apps a rarity, we would speculatively say no, although it might make for a smoother view through Nokia's City Lens, which is fairly hungry. We won't know until some real-life comparisons between the two emerge, but we'd imagine the GPU boost won't make too much of a difference to the average user.

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China Mobile's Lumia 920T packs a Snapdragon S4 Pro, better graphics performance originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink WMPoweruser  |  sourceChina Mobile (Sina Weibo)  | Email this | Comments

China Mobile announces Nokia Lumia 920T, changes its mind soon afterward

China Mobile announces Nokia Lumia 920T, changes its mind soon afterward

Let's face it, China Mobile will carry Nokia's Lumia 920T, with the launch now believed to be in mid-November. Unfortunately, the network itself isn't being so straight forward, announcing the news on Sina Weibo shortly before yanking the post altogether. China Mobile's dithering aside, we're fairly sure the 920T will gain TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE modems, but is otherwise the same phone we've pawed at for the last few weeks.

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China Mobile announces Nokia Lumia 920T, changes its mind soon afterward originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 05:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink WP Central, Winhp (Translated)  |  sourceChina Mobile (Sina Weibo) (Pulled)  | Email this | Comments

ZTE marketing guy goes crazy with unknown WP8 handset and Gaussian blur

ZTE marketing guy goes crazy with unknown WP8 handset and Gaussian blur

Who needs a marketing department when you have a personal Sina Weibo account? So reasoned ZTE's marketing strategy manager, Dennis Lui, as he posted the above photo of three ZTE Windows Phones to the internet. The right-hand device is just a regular ZTE Tania and, although it looks like it's running Windows Phone 8, the screen is actually a dead ringer for a certain "WP8 simulator" app available for WP7 phones. The remaining two devices are obscured by a generous helping of blur, but the handset on the left could well be running legit WP8, as evidenced by the shrunken live tiles, hinting that ZTE may be among the first wave of manufacturers diving into the new OS. To further whet our budget hardware appetites, Lui also posted a photo of a Windows 8 or Windows RT tablet (shown after the break), which suggests that ZTE is getting into that game too.

Continue reading ZTE marketing guy goes crazy with unknown WP8 handset and Gaussian blur

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ZTE marketing guy goes crazy with unknown WP8 handset and Gaussian blur originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink WMPowerUser, Winp.cn  |  sourceSina Weibo  | Email this | Comments