Once Upon a Weibo

I am in love with my Weibo account. It gave life to my fangirl life and is a small corner in the internet where I could take a rest from the stress of Facebook and Twitter. Sina Weibo has been around since 2009 and is now a major part of the online Chinese community. I signed up for the sole purpose of acquiring the latest news on my favorite Japanese group Arashi, but after a while, I discovered that Weibo offers a lot to its users: Fusing elements from both Facebook and Twitter and so much more.

Media in posts- You could add photos or video to your posts, and they are also showed as thumbnails in when you post them. The thumbnails could expand when clicked, making the viewing of photos or videos much easier instead of having it opened in a new tab like Twitter does.

Emoticons- In connection to status-posting, the cool thing about Weibo is its rich offering of various cute emoticons. Remember how Facebook users became excited when they discovered that you could actually put shit in chat conversations? or smileys in comments? Goes to show that humans like anything that visually shows their emotions online.

Popular topics- This one is very much like Twitter's, however aside from showing the top online topics, Weibo arranges them according to broader categories like Hotspots, Television, Weibo Community, Interests, etc.

 Chat Function- Very much like Facebook, enables you to chat with friends, which you could see whether they're online or not in a small sidebar on the right. It only shows the profile photos which is very convenient and doesn't take too much space.

Template settings- One of my favorite features. You could edit how your homepage looks like and Weibo already have cute templates to choose from.

Games-I actually don't care much about the games since I'm not into playing. However the games Weibo has for its users look cool and are different from what Facebook usually offers. Most of it are based on animes and web based games.

Celebrities- Now this is Weibo's real deal. Acquiring celebrities, companies, public personalities resulted in making an effort to verify these users. Those who have proven their identity, as well as meeting the requirements needed, were given a "Verified" status that is visible in their profile as the golden letter "V". That is not all, unlike Twitter, Weibo made the initiative to make a Hall of Fame and to list these prominent users into categories like Media, Sports, Entertainment, Arts, Education, Literature, Fashion, Public Sector, Finance etc.

How to sign up ? I think this one HERE is a good tutorial
Any celebrities I could follow? Western Celebrities HERE, For Asian celebrities =_=? So many of them, you just have to google them yourselves.