I got the best insight from three posts: David Feng’s posts on the (now defunct) Blognation, John Kennedy’s live blog post on this panel, and Thomas Crampton‘s follow on speculations on whether China will Twitter. Actually, I think David Feng‘s coverage is the best starting place for the entire conference.
The panel included discussion of Twitter, Jiwai.de, FanFou, and Buboo.tw. Not mentioned were other microblogging players iLaodao and TaoTao (h/t to a Crampton commenter. Any others of note?). In another great post about Jiwai.de vs. Twitter, Feng asks, “How big is microblogging? Maybe not that big in China — remember, most of us here are a bit more reserved than the laowai lost in foreign lands. Views about microblogging are more on the side of ‘this invades my privacy’, ‘I’m not the kind of guy to tell the World I just had cucumber for lunch’ or ‘I’m so bored that I started microblogging!’” Frankly, I think these sentiments are valid in the US market as well and am not (currently) a big fan of microblogging, except for Facebook Status! Thomas Crampton weighs the positives of high mobile penetration, the lack of home computer access, and a preference for chat/IM over email, vs the negatives of different attitudes toward privacy. Crampton: “Chinese generally prefer semi-anonymous platforms like bulletin boards over blogs. This is due both to concerns about the government keeping tabs on who is saying what, but also due to a preference for staying a below the radar when making comments.”
I don’t think its a foregone conclusion that Twitter will be a mainstream standalone success even in the US. Microblogging can be a nice add on feature to your social network, like Facebook’s Status feature. Success will be driven by the need for people to have microblogging cut across multiple social networks and not be trapped inside of one. But I think that people will in general invest in only 1-2 general purpose social networking platforms (e.g. Facebook) and few will engage in massively parallel SNS participation like Scoble (who I think has some special powers of some sort…I subscribed to two people’s Twitterstreams–David Feng and Robert Scoble–and already feel overwhelmed).
The China specific issues that layer on top of this is really in the area of privacy. On the one hand, Chinese society expects much less personal privacy from vendors and the government. For example, in 2006 I talked to a co-founder of one major online marketplace in China who collaborated with the government to do real-time identity checks against the national (identification) database upon account setup! This allowed the marketplace to use National ID data as data enhancement on top of the profile data provided by the customer. The government was motivated to do so because of their desire to fight against online fraud and fake identities. In talking to some other companies in China, I discovered that the transfer of data from one entity (say a mobile provider) to another (say a bank) was much less regulated and required little consumer notification or permission. Another Chinese entrepreneur said “Chinese people will sell their personal data for one kuai!” since that data is already being sold by both reputable corporations and grey-market data vendors alike. But after reading the Microblogging coverage, I realize that there are more subtle differences between US and Chinese attitudes toward privacy. I want to understand this better.
The vague potential of government control may also enhance these differences in attitudes toward privacy. Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, blogs about a Michael Anti (Zhao Jing) presentation at Harvard where Anti concludes “the Chinese internet has gone “back to the old years” and “we’re making social change using web 1.0, not using web 2.0″ with the emphasis on mailing lists, email, and chat rooms. Many Americans may see things in black and white, with a government intent on repressing freedom of speech and a population struggling to gain this freedom. But in fact, my sense as an outsider to China is that the free-speech activists are viewed by many Chinese as outside the mainstream, and government “harmonization” (I hate this term) and censorship is treated mixed feelings and some degree of reluctant acceptance as people proxy server their way to Wikipedia.
There are probably not direct implications on microblogging but the indirect implications is that all social media will evolve in a bit of a different way, with perhaps people taking on online personas that are not 100% linked to their real life persona, and therefore SNS and microblogging that is explicitly tied to your identity will be less popular or at least need to share the stage with other media that is more in control, more distributed, and more private, such as email, SMS, and mailing lists.
Perhaps there is a role for microblogging as an alternative to RSS feeds in a feedreader, and better for a mobile form factor. A few examples for people to check out on Jiwai.de is CWRblog, or on Twitter CWRblog, DavidFeng, or Scobleizer. Anyway I am a microblogging newbie and would be surprised if this becomes a habit for me.
