Rumor: Tencent to Revamp Microblogging Service
TechWeb, 4/07/13
A source inside Tencent (0700.HK) has revealed that the Shenzhen-based internet company plans to launch a revamped version of its Tencent Microblog service on April 10. The new version of Tencent Microblog will add features including "Hot Topics," "Microcircles" ("Weiquan," unofficial translation), and "Microblog Manager."
The new "Hot Topics" feature automatically aggregates and groups hot topics of discussion on Tencent Microblog under a set of automatically generated topic tags. The feature, which employs language-parsing technology in place of traditional human editors, further emphasizes Tencent Microblog's role as a media outlet. "Microblog Manager" automatically filters out low-quality microblog posts and spam messages.
"Microcircles" automatically groups Tencent Microblog users' "follows" (subscriptions) into categories, and takes into account users' social networks throughout Tencent's entire QQ social ecosystem in suggesting "microcircles" for categorizing new mutual "follows" between users. For one-way "follows" (in which one user follows a user who does not follow them back), the feature will weigh a number of factors, including the subscribers' field of employment and tagging history, in automatically assigning subscriptions to categories.
According to the Tencent source, the new version is intended to further incorporate users' social graphs from the QQ social ecosystem, and to effectively group and filter Tencent Microblog content as a way of driving UGC production and dissemination and increasing user activity. Tencent is in no hurry to run Tencent Microblog as a commercial platform, the source said.
In early 2013, Tencent released figures indicating that Tencent Microblog had 540 mln registered users as of the end of 2012, with daily averages of nearly 100 mln active users, and nearly 9,000 "hot topics" for the whole of 2012.
Keywords: Internet Tencent active users registered users 0700.HK microblogging
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