Twitter Is Trying To Be Simpler – It Learned from China’s Weibo!

Wow, this confirms it – Weibo really is better than Twitter. Reading the official news from Twitter, their new UI interface updates seems to be quite similar to how Weibo has been doing it since its beginning!

I got more information when I read Silicon Filter and yes, there will be users who complain about this – but finally Twitter is making the right moves!! So many of my friends who want to use Twitter get so confused when they first sign up. There is nothing “keeping it all together” – every tweet is separate and all unorganized!

Here are some reasons I have said in China tech news that Sina Weibo is better than Twitter, in my daily usage of the two:

• Comments and Shares are kept inline – Weibo shows how many RTs and comments each tweet (they call it weibo in China) has, and with the click of a button you can expand the comments section to read all the comments. Very convenient and allows much more interactive conversation. Whereas in Twitter, each reply to a message is independent and not kept together in the conversation.
• I just click on the comments section under my weibo (tweet) to see all the comments that people have said about my message. Similar to above, but shows that I can see the comments on the same screen nice and clean, expand and collapse. Whereas in Twitter, I have to click one-by-one on each @ reply to see what conversation they were replying to. It creates more chaos and takes more time to understand what people are chatting about.
• Real Time carries the tweet along in the next conversation, as well as keeps updating the original tweet’s RTs and comments inside of the RT. So in the original message I shared, others can still keep track of those new comments and shares (its not static / permanent)
• Weibo lets me put my full comments in RT, and shows original tweet – in twitter, if you share another person’s tweet, you also are limited to 140 characters, whereas in Weibo, you have more room to add your comment, and separately below it the original post is kept intact.

I have the screenshots at the bottom of this blog to see some differences between Twitter’s interface and Chinese Sina Weibos.

I’m not the only person who says so – my buddy Larry Salibra suggested Google Plus to copy from Weibo as he says its a better experience. Doug who just arrived in China, doing research says http://www.digital-dd.com/sina-weibo-threat/ Weibo is a threat to Twitter – they do have an English mobile app now, and may soon expand to USA and other English countries.

Maybe Twitter is realizing this, and reacting. But Twitter also has its hands full with Facebook and Google Plus I imagine.

Probably another reason American internet companies are so frustrated with China. Majority of Western social media platforms are blocked in China – therefore blocking the Chinese userbase from signing up and thus giving more “value” to these social media companies. Not to mention then letting the Chinese social media companies to “copy” and benefit from this unfair advantage.

Overall, I am happy about this update in Twitter. While I am a tweetdeck (3rd party platform for twitter) user and plan to continue, I’m hope more of my American friends can move off of facebook and onto Twitter – its just so much faster and lighter to use.