2007 Chinese Bogger Conference and Twitter

Chinese Blogger Conference has taken place in Beijing as well as virtually on the Internet from November 3 to 4 in Beijing. It's the third national wide Blogger Conference in China. It provided us a good chance to have a close look at the new trends and development in China's Cyberspace. What we want to discuss here is Twitter, the first and the most interesting panel in the third Chinese Blogger Conference.

What is Twitter?

If you ask this question, you will be considered an outdated guy.

Twitter is the most new and cool topic not only in western world but also in China. Twitter is the mobile phone micro-blog. A more accurate definition form wikipedia is: 'Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific." It is a bridge between Cyberspace and mobile media. Twitter is a new web2.0 service founded by Obvious Corp, an US based company. Now it is considered to be a web2.0 platform and business model that may have even more potential than Youtube and Facebook, especially in China. As a research group that has studied mobile media in China for 3 years, we almost agree with their ideas. The first advantage of Twitter in China is the huge size of mobile subscribers. According to the most updated data from MII (Ministry of Information Industry of China), up to September 2007, the number of mobile phone subscribers has reached 523 million. Now China is the biggest market of mobile phone and wireless communication in the world. This is an obvious advantage for Twitter in China. The potential market size is really big. If one percent of the mobile phone users use Twitter, the number of Twitter users will reach 5 million. Besides, the usage of mobile phone in China is also an advantage to promote Twitter in China. Like other East Asian countries, Japan and Korea for example, text message is extreme popular in China. According to the report from MII, in the first 8 months in 2006, the text message volume reached 273.67 billion, representing an increase of 43.6% compared with the same period of the previous year. In China, especially in the urban areas, text message has entered every corner of life. So people may feel very natural to write blog via text message. Thus, Twitter gets more chance to become a new popular communication channel.

What do you think about Twitter? Do you believe it will become a popular communication channel and profitable industry?

We hope to hear your ideas.

To be continued.