Weibo: 45 degrees elevation of the future

We're all looking up to the others

Weibo (microblogging) services have sprung up in China, a small blog that can post information in just 140 words, and Tencent, the traditional portal Sina and the real-time messenger, has gone through a period of more than 100 million users, compared with the previous SNS social network even more hot.

Why Sina, which runs the internet media, and Tencent, which runs social tools, can push the development of Weibo so smoothly, in addition to their original advantages of having a broad range of user groups, this background also reveals the dual nature of Weibo itself: media characteristics and social characteristics. And all the key, based on the author called "45 degree elevation" characteristics.

Weibo's greatest design is the "attention" (Follow) feature. Every Weibo user has his focus, and as long as he's locked up, he's a fan of that person (Follower). Similarly, everyone will be paid attention to, there will be fans. Fans can receive information from objects that he is interested in, both original and forward.

A fascinating but embarrassing social phenomenon: you only pay attention to the people you can see. That is to say, you are looking at the person at the elevation of 45 degrees, or at least horizontally. Most Weibo users, in addition to their own postings, receive information from the person he looks up to, and forward them to others who look at themselves at a 45-degree angle. Information, passed in such a process.

This familiar phenomenon in society, we call it "Gao Gao".

Do not deny the existence of this 45 degree angle. This feature is more pronounced on Weibo than on social networks. One of the most critical features of social networking is "add to Buddy", which is a 0-degree perspective from naming-since being called a friend is a parallel relationship-and Weibo is called a fan (Follower), which is fundamentally different.

Changes in the source of news information

According to Yahoo research findings, the US microblogging service provider Twitter only 20,000 elite users attracted 50% of the attention, and the 20,000 elite users accounted for only 0.05% of the total number of Twitter users. The main components of elite users are: Celebrities, bloggers, representatives of media organizations, as well as other formal groups and ordinary user representatives.

Everyone is looking at the source of information at a 45-degree elevation, which is bound to form a pyramid structure that leads to information still provided by a few elites. In this system, even if there is a voice from the grassroots, it must be because after a magnitude of the elite forwarding (amplification), resulting in a lot of concern. Otherwise, its sound must soon be submerged in the system.

To delve into the media characteristics of Weibo, this differs from the traditional media in that the sources of information are based on human units rather than organizational units. Yahoo Research also pointed out in the same report that the media organizations posted the most information on Twitter, while celebrities attracted the largest number of fans. Only 15% of the Twitter messages received by ordinary users come from media organizations.

Traditional media as an organized, authoritative and regular publisher of information, its power base is being quickly eroded. Weibo has become a major source of news information for modern people, and even threatens the traditional web portal business. Traditional portals do their best to aggregate the content produced by various traditional bodies, and if they do not change, their importance and value will be diminished.

Decentralization and incorporation of power will be a problem that the portal must consider. In addition to continuing its traditional content aggregation and original content publishing, the Web portal has become an important source of information for its microblog business, with the media content being forwarded to the celebrity for a more effective communication. Water can also carry a boat, to see how to use.

Weibo is the information filter

On Weibo, the information you receive is actually filtered by someone else because it feels worth writing or forwarding. In other words, the person you focus on determines the width of your vision. A lot of people began to focus on micro-blog Too many people, resulting in a huge amount of information flooded. People's time is very limited, meaning that you can only look at the elevation of 45 degrees to the few.

This feature causes Weibo to become a "filtering and filtering system for information," and to be more dramatic, you feel that important people are helping you decide which things are important, and "deciding which information is important" is what the search engine did before. Whether Google or Baidu, it is through an algorithm to determine its search results in accordance with the importance of ranking.

In the United States, social networking Facebook's traffic has overtaken Google's traffic and has become an important source of information for people. In China, the role is more likely to be played by micro-bleomycin. People believe that the information provided by their trusted sources of information, which relies on interpersonal systems to filter the effect of the information, than the traditional search engines according to the technical calculation of the more people taste.

Of course, search engines are not to be replaced because the information they handle is more biased toward static information than dynamic real-time information. However, the amount of information that modern people are exposed to is too large to be screened. Search engines have previously been able to deal with this problem, but it still seems inadequate. The author often in a large number of search results in the ebb tide, still need to spend a lot of time.

Search results should conform to context. Consider introducing some community mechanisms to get people involved in coping with information filtering and filtering, which will be the direction that search engines must think about. Micro Bo is a real-time information filter and amplifier, and this result is a small "attention" function reached, admire its inventor of human "45 degrees elevation" in the deep observation of the heart. " (article: "Ka Fung Capital" Investment Partners Huang Shaolin)