Weibo is a big deal in China. It’s even bigger than Twitter.
Sina Weibo broke records with the ringing in of the Chinese New Year this weekend which saw more than 32,312 messages sent per second according to The Next Web. The utter volume of messages saw 481,207 messages sent during the first minute of the new year.
As previously reported by us, Weibo is the only alternative to Twitter in the country and the two services that offer it, Sina and Tencent, both claim more than 200 million users each. It was Sina Weibo that shattered all previous records. Tencent Weibo was not mentioned in the report, but I’m sure they were adding their own impressive numbers as well.
The record held by Twitter is when Japanese tweeters took to the service during the climactic moment of Castle in the Sky. That event garnered over 11,000 tweets per second.
It still remains to be seen if this trend will continue as the government plans to make users register under their real names. It may make less people join the service or send less messages, but it probably won’t stop the Chinese from using social media as a form of communication.