Photo: Guo Yingguang/GT

By Matthew Jukes and James Tiscione

At the end of last month Internet giant Sina very quietly dropped a bomb into the cyber world, launching the latest version of their Weibo (microblog) iPhone app in English. The media picked it up and ran with the idea that Weibo could slowly be looking to edge out the competition (Twitter). Always willing to give a test run, we at Metro Beijing fired up our iEquipment to give it a whirl.

The first obstacle is going through the sign-up process in Chinese. While it only takes a rudimentary grasp to work out name, address and e-mail, you're competing with several million users for names. The first Global Times reporter to try the service entered every possible combination of letters using his own name, each rejected as being too popular.

Once beyond the mandatory e-mails, the interface is indeed in English, although certain notifications will only appear in Chinese. There's always a symbol at the top to let you add your latest Weibo, and switching tabs allows you to adjust various features to keep track of what's been said. Now it's time to start looking for Beijing's best and brightest.

Some expat magazines such as The Beijinger and Shanghaiist are posting almost exclusively in English, while others like City Weekend and Time Out remain in Chinese.

Wayne Riley runs his own recording studio in Beijing, and has been using Weibo to keep in touch. "I was introduced to it by a business contact who suggested that it was China's equivalent to Twitter and I should be on it. Most of the people on it are younger people, normally under 35," said Riley, "but we get a lot of responses in both English and Chinese."

Music venues use it to promote upcoming gigs, and artists use it to keep in touch with fans. Beijing-based Canadian singer Ember Swift has her own Weibo account, writing predominantly in Chinese. 

"I actually think it's a lot better than Twitter; I use it for meeting fans and keeping in contact with them," she said. "You can go direct to videos and pictures without linking out like you do with Twitter." 

Although news resources are available, they remain quite scarce; China Radio International microblogs panel discussion program Today (TodayonBeyondBeijing), financial and investment news site Marketwatch.com (MarketWatch) posts regularly while an unofficial New York Times Weibo (NewYorkTimes) posts news blurbs in Chinese and English. 

But foreign journalists have been harvesting Weibo for stories ever since it launched.

"I have noticed increasing use of translated tweets in foreign coverage of events," explains Brendan O'Kane, respected Beijing translator and English Weibo user. "Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Josh Chin of the Wall Street Journal have been ahead of the curve. In both cases, though, they're finding and translating tweets on a certain topic, rather than translating popularly re-tweeted posts."

There are those, however, doing the "sift n' filter" shuffle for us. Charles Custer at World of Chinese Magazine (ChineseWORLD) has been leading the pack posting items from Chinese language news in English, as has Forbes Magazine Beijing bureau chief Gady Epstein (gadyepstein).

Unsurprisingly, tech bloggers have had the biggest jump on most, including Kai Lukoff from China newcomer Techrice.com (Techrice), Silicon Alley Insider (alleyinsider) and China blogger Bill Bishop (Billbishop) from IT and Internet blog DigiCha, who published online a 20-page guide on microblogging in China for the Putonghua-illiterate as Sina soared on the NASDAQ. 

And as English becomes more prominent - and not just English learning Weibo like Zhang Jieying, the English Prince (englishprince) with his 1.76 million followers - we'll be seeing content from more diverse contributors like the new ChinaMusicPod (chinamusicpod) and the "microblogging monk," Buddhist master Xuecheng, abbot of Beijing's Longquan Temple (English_Master Xuecheng).

After a week on Weibo, our English only speaking user got several posts deleted, no replies, and never got re-Weibo'd. Not exactly a promising start. But we did find a small but growing online community beginning to use the service in a language that is not Chinese. On the flip side, our experts here at Global Times already have their own bilingual Weibo account; if you want to see how the professionals do it, check out gtmetrobjnews. Here's to a bright future for Sina's world domination.