As one of the largest countries on the world, china has the greatest online social media potential market. In the past 15 years (1999-2014), the Chinese online social media has been going throw a dramatic change, and it is still going on. In terms of the platform of the online social media in china, QQ, Weibo and Wechat play important roles in these changes, also, in my point of view, these software respectively indicate an new era of Chinese online social media.
Dated back to 1999, Tencent, the company which has been operating QQ for more than 15 years, released the first version of QQ, which was called “QICQ” at that time. Obviously the name as well as the concept of QICQ was derived from ICQ, which was the first “instant messaging” services on the world. Later, due to legal reason, Tencent changed the name QICQ to QQ. Ever since QQ has become the online social media software with the greatest scale of members in china. By March 2013, there are nearly 800 millions active QQ accounts around the world.
Initially, QQ was operated as an instant messaging service, the main purpose of using QQ at that time was keeping in touch with friends or business partners (actually it’s still the main motivation of using it). Nonetheless, Tencent company became multifunctional by means of the QQ fans base, and QQ itself has been changing all the times, not only the improvement of the user experience, but also the additional functions such as QQ game platform, QQ space (similar to Blog), QQ music etc. At this stage QQ is no longer merely an instant messaging software, but the centre and base of the hundreds of thousands of services provided by Tencent. Meanwhile, the world famous instant messaging software MSN had already quit from china due to its failure in competing with QQ. We can claim that QQ led Chinese into a online social media era.
The advent of Weibo, which is the most popular microblog in china, was took place at 2009. In fact before it was launched, there were already several microblogs existing in china, including Fanfou, Jiwai and QQ taotao, also the international online social media facebook and twitter was among the list at that time. However, Chinese government shut down almost all existing microblog services at 2009 (facebook and twitter are still being blocked now) due to political reason. After that, few months later, Sina launched a microblog service, and named it Weibo, which the pronunciation is similar to microblog in china. Although other companies launched their own microblogs right after Sina, Weibo still keeps the dominate position within this area.
Weibo, in my point of view, is the combination of facebook and twitter. Similar to facebook, Weibo is an online social networking service. The networking is usually based on “follow” and “follower”, in another word, fans. All the posts and status of the people you follow will show on your screen (unless you were blacklisted by your “friend”). Also its multifunctionality, including trends (can show you what’s the hottest topic), topic (to talk with unknown people but share the same interest in a specific topic), games etc makes it more than a simple social networking service and more attractive. However, one of the main difference is the characters limitation. The same as twitter, Weibo has the 140 characters limitation. Nevertheless, as the difference between Chinese and English, 140 chinese characters have the capability to contain much more information than 140 English characters. For example Chinese just need two characters to express the meaning of microblog (微博), while English needs nine to express the same meaning. In a certain period of time it even became the major contact information between friends. People ask for their friends’ Weibo accounts rather than QQ accounts or telephone numbers.
Although strictly speaking QQ and Weibo are not rival (instant messaging service VS social networking service), people can talk with friends via QQ and post their microblogs via Weibo. Weibo somehow is challenging the dominant position of QQ in online communication aspect. So at 2011 Tencent released a new software: Wechat. Actually it’s not a new concept because Wechat works quite similar to Line and Whatsapp, even in china there is a software called Feixin that works exactly the same as Wechat. Released by the same company, the biggest difference between QQ and Wechat is about the voice message. Wechat is defined as an instant messaging service with voice message. Although long time before Wechat was released QQ could already be used to send voice message, the users seldom use QQ to send voice message ( in my opinion it’s because of the users’ stereotype). Since speaking is much more convenient than typing, so right after Wechat was released, it become very prevalent in a short period of time. (Actually the fans base of Tencent and the excellent promotion of Weichat did play notable and undeniable role in the process of popularisation of Wechat).
Besides the voice message, another function that makes Wechat prevalent is “Moments”, which actually functions like Weibo, on where people can post the status and pictures, as well as repost other people’s moments. In another word, Wechat is the simple integration of QQ and Wechat, users can chat with friends and post their “moments” by the same software. (Ironically, it seems that Wechat has taken over prior preference of instant messaging software from QQ, at least within the user base of oversea Chinese students in Australia.)
From QQ to Weibo to Wechat, we can tell that users’ demand is changing. From the very beginning, chatting service could bring satisfaction to most users. Later on, people were looking forward to interaction with friends rather than simply chatting with them , also they wanted to share their joy and sadness and other emotions with friends, so that’s one of the reason why Weibo became popular in a short period of time (in another word they were looking for a chinese version facebook). Nowadays they don’t want to switch between several softwares when they want to chat and post simultaneously, so Wechat dominates the social networking service market within Chinese community. Nobody can tell that what will happen tomorrow, but the changes of social networking services will keep on and on for sure.
Batela 