The other leading microblog, called Tencent Weibo, now also requires new users to register with their real name.
You go through any big Chinese airport now you see Tencent Weibo ads.
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Tencent Weibo is very similar to Sina Weibo in terms of functionality and demographics, and has about 200-250 million users.
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You drive from Hong Kong over to Kowloon, you can see a Tencent Weibo billboard that has been there for months.
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Tencent, which is a major player in the Chinese market, offers several internet services, including Tencent Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site.
You could even argue that Sina (SINA) Weibo is doing this in their battle against Tencent Weibo, as they are pursuing market share over monetization.
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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.
Owen Fletcher of Dow Jones notes that at the end of September leading weibo provider Tencent reported having 310 million registered weibo users while Sina Weibo reported 227 million registered users.
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On the identity level, possible partners in China are Sina Weibo and Tencent.
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They can vote on Twitter and Facebook, and on the Chinese social media websites Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ.
What is new is that social media platforms like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weixin now instantly expose the gritty details.
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Some people have multiple microblog accounts: Tencent has its own QQ-branded Weibo service.
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Lee explains that the two Weibo platforms, Sina and Tencent, compete with each other to achieve greater degrees of transparency, which is a relative novelty in China.
In fact, the two companies that started the weibo craze, Sina Corporation and Tencent Holdings now count eight times more users than Twitter worldwide.
The December regulations affected millions of microbloggers using the largest weibo companies, Sina, Sohu and Tencent, which are based in those cities.
Last year was a watershed year for users of weibo sites such as those run by Sina Corp and Tencent Holdings.
Sina introduced the microblogging weibo to its online services in 2009 to try to catch up with rival Tencent.
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