Several years ago, Sina.com provided a service called blog in the Internet. During its early years, few people knew it and almost nobody used it. This small group people used it to write diaries and keep photos. However, they usually did not know each other, so it was very hard for one to visit another's website, which caused few interactions and communications took place on it. Besides, the things that post on the blog were regularly a whole essay or a series of photos, it was not convenient that people had to sit in front of computer for a long time to post a blog. The first time I used it was in the year 2007, to see the travelling photos of my friends, and it was also the last time.
In 2009, a new social media called micro-blog came out, also was provided by Sina.com, but in this time it really made different. Firstly, micro-blog was an app in the mobile phone, and unlike blog, it did not need to write a whole essay, what to write could be a sentence, a photo and even an emoticon, so people can post it whenever like in a few minutes. More importantly, it could be related to contacts on the phone, so one could easily become another's follows and comment on it, which was called interaction.
For the reasons mentioned above, the number of users of micro-blog is much bigger that of blog, so micro-blog has become the biggest online social media. In this big platform, many derivative products such as micro-blog shop appear and become popular, micro-blog is not only a tradition sense of online social media. I will talk about this next time.
source：http://top.weibo.com/
