[seanmcdirmid]

They've definitely piled on the features for weibo to suit the Chinese audience; most of this innovation is local. The nice thing about Twitter was its simplicity, that you don't have to load pics in the tweets you receive, that the visual design is simple, and you don't have any pointless reputation side games to distract you. Weibo goes and adds those features, I don't think it makes it better than twitter in anyway, although it is definitely different.

Couple that with the fact that 140 ideographic Chinese characters is much more information than a 140 phoentic letters (say 1.5, 2 times as much) along with threaded discussions, and weibo begins to look more like full on social networking than just microblogging. The way weibo has bitten into Kaixin and Renren is evidence of that.

However, I wouldn't call "Weibo" more than a Twitter clone until they are allowed to compete head-to-head with Twitter by the Chinese government. Weibo is simply Twitter in China because Twitter isn't allowed to exist.