Bring That Beat … Over! To 1.3 Billion

I was thinking about this just before getting up some time ago: Why is it that the whole of Beijing sees only 250 Twitter-ers? Think about it: Beijing is big. Huge. Gargantuan. It makes all of those Korean towns I’ve been through on my South Korean trip look like mere districts of the Chinese capital. We’re talking about 16 million. So why is Twitter not tweeting along fine in the capital of the PRC?

The one big problem: The language factor.

Twitter’s biggest problem is that everything is in English. In the world of Web 2.0, though, English is getting more and more “human”; however, even with all that “human language” in play, it’s still not a case of all folks understanding the Anglican tongue.

Another big issue with Twitter is that its servers are geographically outside of China. Because the Web works like a huge big intranet inside China, speeds are faster if the site is inside the wall than outside.

There’s yet another big problem with Twitter: to update your tweets using SMS, you need to text up Britain — the only internationally-open number is prefixed +44, somewhere in the British isles. International SMS is 10 times the cost of standard SMS; the moment a text message leaves the mainland, you pay CNY 1, not CNY 0.10.

One final problem with Twitter in China is that its IM services don’t work over MSN (Windows Live Messenger) or QQ, which is what most Chinese IM people use. Support for these two protocols could see an upsurge in users.

Twitter is a big brand, no doubt, and if it can make it big in China, it wouldn’t be too much out of the ordinary. But more and more Chinese are going local — they’re using local services such as Jiwai.de — and they’re getting more and more powerful. Twitter should certainly grow a bit of the Chinese lingo lexicon and start offering some China-specific services to secure its stake in the nation of 1.3 billion.

Tags: blognation, China, blognation China, microblogging, Twitter