Sina Releasing Tumblr-like, Light-blogging Service Qing

Sina, the Chinese portal which recently regains its vigor with the huge success of Weibo (like twitter) service, is beta-testing a Tumblr-like light blogging product, Sina Qing.

Sina has been the de-facto winner in the Chinese microblogging war, its Weibo boasts about 140 million users by the end of April. Although according to Tencent statistics, its weibo service claims over 160 million users, its user engagement isn’t on a par with that of Sina Weibo.

Are there any other opportunities to break through?

Diandian founder Xu Zhaojun thinks so. The former head of Renren unveiled Diandian, a Tumblr like light blogging site, raising US$ 10 million from Ceyuan Capital, Sequoia Capital and Innovation Works.

Although Facebook and Twitter rules the U.S social networking area, Tumble managed to break through into a new market. Founded by David Karp in 2007, Tumblr facilitated 250 million daily pageviews as of May, hosting 18.8 million blogs and 5.5 billion posts. A lot of famous people and media companies are also using Tumblr, just like how they use Twitter.

Micro-blogging war spilling over to light-blogging

Besides Diandian, Shanda, the Chinese online game operator, also released its very own light-blogging product Tuita. The Chinese microblogging war has settled, but there is still open opportunity for light-blogging.

With huge user base and high engagement, Sina Qing fits right into the gap between Sina Weibo and Sina Blog, the former is easy to use but fall short in multimedia features, while the latter is more powerful but lacks behind in usability. Combining their strengths, Sina Qing will be a major threat to Diandian and other light-blogging services in China. The bottom line is, majority of weibo users have been engaged actively on Sina; the Chinese portal can easily transfer these uses to its own platform.