Gizmodo uncovered the trick and it spread quickly across the microblogging service.
But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester's crown Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop.
Sina said the number of registered users for its Weibo microblogging service has now topped 100 million, doubling from four months ago.
Mr. Lin racked up roughly a million new followers on Sina Weibo, China's most active Twitter-like microblogging service, in the first half of February.
Twitter, the microblogging service he cofounded in 2006, has turned a reported 500 million people worldwide into broadcasters of messages capable of starting revolutions.
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On the blog of security firm Sunbelt Software, researcher Christopher Boyd highlighted Tuesday a new wave of spam messages flooding into the microblogging service.
FORBES: "Marvelous," "Incredible," "Revolutionary" Spam Aims To Infect Twitterers
It also set off a strong reaction on China's Sina Weibo microblogging service because Mr. Buffett is well-known in increasingly wealthy China, which prizes investment know-how.
But you can do the next best thing and invest in Sina, a Chinese Internet company which is the parent of Weibo, a Twiter-like microblogging service.
Sina, boosted by the success of its microblogging service, is considered a test case for whether smaller firms can catch up with the big three at all.
On Wednesday evening, the microblogging service suspended the account of Operation: Payback, a group most recently devoted to launching cyberattacks against anyone perceived as an enemy of WikiLeaks.
Then Mr Leetaru and his co-researchers plotted who was communicating with whom to get a sense of the geographic distances dividing people who regularly chat via the microblogging service.
BBC: Twitter users defeat the distance barrier and reach out
Twitter, a microblogging service, received 679 requests from American authorities for information about users in the first half of this year, which is more than it got in all of 2011.
Sina shares are trading sharply lower Friday morning after the Beijing city government issued new rules requiring users of its microblogging service Weibo and other Twitter-like services to register with their real names.
Juneyao recalled a flight out of Shanghai and transferred passengers to another plane after determining there was no safety threat, the airline said in a statement posted to the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service.
New rules in the city of Beijing set to go into effect on Friday would require users to register their real names with microblogging service operators, though they could still write in public under pseudonyms.
According to Tencent, whose services include instant messaging service QQ, microblogging site Tencent Weibo - which is similar to Twitter - and online games, WeChat has close to 300 million users.
Weibo service, one of China's most popular microblogging services, with one post on Sina's in-house top-news feed racking up more than 60, 000 reposts and 15, 000 comments in less than three hours.
Spokesman Paul Colford said the wire service had disabled other Twitter accounts following the attack and was working with the microblogging site to investigate the breach.
BBC: AP Twitter account hacked in fake 'White House blasts' post
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