Zuosa.com, one of the first Chinese Twitter clones announced on its website to stop operating in next month citing inadequate resources to sustain the service. Zuosa translates to “what are you doing”.
zuosa announcement on homepage
Founded in 2007, two years before Sina Weibo’s inception in late 2009, Zuosa is among the first batch of Chinese Twitter clones along with Fanfou, Digu and Jiwai. Now after nearly six year of – let’s just say – developing, Fanfou is still there, struggling; jiwai.de appears to be out of service; digu doesn’t sound right after a big downsizing and pivoting; Zuosa is to shutter soon.
It’s true that independent weibo produced by startups aren’t able to pull through under intensive competition raised by rivals like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, which are backed with deep money and sufficient resources.
We once wrote that Follow5, a weibo synching tool discontinued its service in late last year, now you may know why, there just aren’t enough independent weibos for Follow5 to serve.