WEIBO ADDS NEW MULTIMEDIA FUNCTIONS

Twitter has been very slow in incorporating multimedia to it’s posts, many of us will only recently have been thinking how great it is that we can now see a photo in our twitter feed, rather than always having to reply on external links that tear us away from our social media world, but Weibo has been far ahead of the game when it came to incorporating multimedia content, providing a wealth of jpegs and gifs all embedded and visible in Weibo posts from pretty much the birth of Weibo. 

Weibo has now gone a step further and started making it easy for Weibo fans to shoot video and upload it all within the app, it currently lacks effects and filters, so there is room for improvement with the app, but it is a step forward for Weibo, who have been struggling recently with the popularity of messaging app Wechat.

With the popularity of Vine and Instagram in the west, could we soon see a Chinese clone that is strong enough to drag social media fans away from their multipurpose social media apps into a more segmented world, rendering Weibo’s new multimedia efforts as too little too late, or too much too early, only time will tell.

One issue that Weibo could soon face however is the stringent and sometime overbearing restrictions placed on politically sensitive or undesirable content, which can be more difficult for Weibo to filter through and prevent.

Article: Jimmy Robinson, Aoze Zhang