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Sina Weibo iPhone App, Now in English

Sina Weibo iPhone App, Now in English

The fast-growing popularity of Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging service, has sent share prices of Sina Corp. soaring and made the Chinese Web portal the subject of much discussion.

Now, Sina Weibo’s iPhone app has a new English interface enabling non-Chinese readers to see what some of the hype is about.

Of course, an English-language interface isn’t going to help users understand the many messages being posted on the site everyday or interact with most of Sina Weibo’s some 100 million users. But it might make posting messages a little easier for Stephon Marbury, Bill Gates, and Tom Cruise, who post Weibo messages in English and get responses in both English and Chinese.

Michael Clendenin, managing director of research firm RedTech Advisors (China) LLC, said it can help overseas investors, too. They know it’s incredibly popular, but there are still “so many who don’t know what the platform is,” he said.

Though Sina Weibo is often compared to Twitter it has built in and popularized features that Twitter doesn’t have, such as grouping related messages together as conversation threads and letting users post photos and videos directly within their messages.

A move like this wouldn’t gain a significant foreign membership for Sina Weibo, but “it’s smart for” Sina “to go out and develop something that investors can understand so they can go and use it,” Mr. Clendenin said, adding that more understanding could drive Sina’s value up even further. As of last Thursday, the company’s market cap was more than $8 billion.

[Thanks: http://blogs.wsj.com]

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