The man behind China’s hottest Twitter-like site, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA - News) CEO Charles Chao, said that a redesign for Sina Weibo was in the works when he recently revealed some updated financials. And the Chinese blog TechWeb has already got its hands on pictures of the Weibo redesign which is being dubbed v5 - the fifth version of Weibo.
First up, looking at one's Weibo profile page, it clearly resembles Facebook’s Timeline cover, with the individual’s avatar partially embedded in a picturesque banner. That’ll create plenty of scope for amusing Weibo cover photos in the future, just as we’ve seen happen with Facebook:
But for the view that most people are looking at all the time, their Weibo stream, the v5 redesign is less radical. Here we see a welcome bit of toning things down - quite literally - as inactive icons in the left sidebar become greyed-out:
A major new feature will be allowing Weibo posts to go out only to a certain circle of friends - just like with Google+ posts and Facebook wall messages. The current version of Sina Weibo does have rudimentary support for grouping - or circling - your followers together, and clearly that’ll be more useful once this new version launches.
There’s no word yet on a redesign for Sina’s bland Weibo mobile app. The website’s redesign will go into closed beta testing this week, Techweb adds, and will hopefully become an opt-in public beta before it gets rolled out later this year.
Chinese websites have a tendency to get overbloated very quickly, so we’ll have to wait and see if new features like the circled posts get used well, or just become another part of the clutter and confusion.
Sina Weibo currently has over 320 million registered users, but has proved to be a huge challenge to monetize. To help with this, Sina recently rolled out Twitter-esque ads in the form of promoted posts.
[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]
