beyondbrics

Most Western internet executives frown at the notion that Chinese internet companies are innovators. But what Sina, the country’s largest news portal, is doing with its microblog may change their minds.

Sina’s microblog, or Weibo, started in 2009 as little more than a Twitter clone – with Chinese characteristics in that it self-censors content, a necessary condition for any internet company that wishes to remain online in China.

But, as I report on ft.com,  the service has now moved far beyond that. Over the past few weeks, the service has added a location-based service resembling Foursquare and an instant messaging tool. That comes in addition to social networking functions such as discussion groups and virtual meeting and market places – a mixture that makes Sina Weibo a more complete and varied social media platform than either Twitter or Facebook.

Make no mistake, the main pattern in the development of the internet industry in China is still copying ideas from the US – in the latest example, more than 1000 Groupon clones flooded the Chinese market even before the American original group buying website could get its own China version online.

Tencent, the world’s third-largest internet company by market capitalization, built China’s largest online user base by imitating ICQ, the instant messaging tool. and Baidu, China’s largest search engine, gained its dominant position in the Chinese online advertising market by creating a local version of what Google and Yahoo were doing.

But following that initial spark from the US, some Chinese internet firms have been truly innovative in tweaking their business model in unique ways. Tencent was the first to succeed in this kind of business model innovation – it built a simple me-too tool into a social networking empire no rival managed to break into for years. Sina seems to be on the same path.