It’s Sina Weibo’s Turn to Hats off to Path

We’re written Path clone, then we’ve written Path clone again, and then we’ve written them again and again. And now its Sina Weibo, the most popular Chinese SNS’s turn to pay tribute to the Valley-based private SNS community.

Sina Weibo just launched its own approach to Path, dubbed Meyou, (translates to Close Friends in Chinese). Meyou also lets people keep in close touch with close friends by sharing “location, photos, posts” and so on. You can log in directly with your Weibo account, and all your connections on Weibo will be automatically transferred to the app, though you need to add them one by one again as “close friends” in Meyou because all these connections are open on Sina Weibo for its one-way follow mechanism.

photo credit: TechWOM

In addition to the sharing feature, Meyou enhanced weibo’s private messaging feature, you can message your Weibo friends from the app, just like what you can do with the official Sina Weibo mobile app.

It seems to many that, just like Twitter will never make a Facebook, Sina Weibo will never make a QZone or Tencent Pengyou because of its rooted openness. So Sina Weibo now comes up with a “hypercorrection”, making an app like Path that is even more closed than Facebook.

Prior to the launch of Meyou, Sina Weibo debuted another new product called Weiba as the latest addition to the grand Weibo product arsenal. Just like we said before, Sina Weibo is heavily leveraging on the platform to produce a flurry of products to ramp up user stickiness and, probably potential revenue sources.