Sina, Tencent's Next Real Enemy

We were reporting that Sina Weibo is taking away Kaixin001’s traffic as they all mainly target at white-collar class at this moment. Tencent QQ’s users are more grassroot which sounds like no overlap with Sina’s target, and 50millions users of Sina Weibo is nothing comparable to QQ’s user base (latest data shows QQ’s online users at one time has reached 120millions.). But, if you still remember that, when Kaixin001 smashed into the market, many experts were thinking of its potential threat to Tencent as they believe QQ’s users will eventually grow up one day and potentially become white-collar class, now we may have the same reason to say, Sina could be Tencent’s next enemy, and this time, the threat might be more real and tougher because Sina has much stronger background and resource, and more important, it is more open.

Let’s just do a quick review of what Sina has been doing in past a few months:

• Sina Weibo – is a huge success with 50millions users in one year and become a phenomenon in Chinese social media.
• Sina Weibo Open Platform – If Kaixin001 was smart enough and open up its social network at the right time, its current situation might be better than now. Sina obviously learns the lesson and also study Twitter’s growth in depth. Sina Weibo from the beginning, has the courage to open up for third-parties.
• Strategical Partnership with MSN China – when QQ and 360 were busy with fighting against each other, Sina announced the partnership with MSN China (our coverage). The partnership simply gives Sina a huge possibility of from web to client, from online media to instant messaging.
• Sina Weibo Group service – the group service is a new feature in test of Sina Weibo. Users can set up a group where the tweet you publish can only be broadcasted to the group members. In some sense, it functions like group-chat. So this become more interesting. Note that QQ’s group chat feature is one of the key reasons beat ICQ and even MSN years back. So what if Sina Weibo’s group service got popular then later it’s integrated into MSN messenger? Well, that could be something….hum?

Nothing serious, yet. But as Pony Ma said recently, I am feeling the threat everyday.