Doug Young

Corporate China | Weibo: Facebook's new shop, Baidu's new gadget, Xue Manzi's drivel

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Is the unverified account the latest effort by Facebook to find a backdoor into China? Photo: Reuters

Doug Young

Published: 9:56am, 9 Sep 2014Updated: 9:56am, 9 Sep 2014

This week’s tech round-up from the microblogging realm is a flurry of interesting but unrelated news bits, as the world gets back to work following the end of the summer holidays. Leading the list is the latest effort by Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) to find a backdoor into China, which comes in the form of a new Weibo account that isn’t verified but has at least one tech executive spreading the word and encouraging people to follow the page.

Meantime, online search leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) generated some microblogging buzz when it unveiled an unusual pair of high-tech chopsticks in Beijing. Last but not least there's Xue Manzi, a tech investor also known as Charles Xue, who was busy hyping a tech start-up on his microblog. Xue is a man I came to dislike over the years for his largely empty talk, even as he built up a base of more than 10 million followers on Weibo (Nasdaq: WB). But then he got sent to prison for becoming too influential and political, making me more sympathetic, before his release in April and quick return to vacuous blogging.

We'll kick off this back-to-school tech chatter column with the most intriguing item from my list, namely the mysterious appearance of a Weibo account purporting to be operated by Facebook. Most techies know that Facebook is blocked in China, even though the company has said repeatedly that it wants to enter the market. It is currently moving in that direction, and this year began looking for office space in Beijing to sell advertising to Chinese clients.

The appearance of this intriguing new Facebook site was exposed in a microblog post from Lu Jiansheng, the Hong Kong chief for Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC (Taipei: 2498). Lu doesn't say much, except to include a link to the account and to urge people to follow it.

I've had a look myself, and there's no "V" on the account, which means its authenticity hasn't been verified by Weibo. The site also has a reliability rating of "1", the lowest rating that is automatically assigned to all new accounts. This account is indeed quite new, and has only been posting since August 31. And yet despite that newness, it already has an impressive 130,000 followers. The postings on the account also aren't too exciting, totaling only five to date when I checked it out. But if it's authentic and receives the coveted "V" rating, it could become an interesting window onto what Facebook is planning for China.

Next let's move to the gadget realm, where Baidu's new high-tech chopsticks were getting attention from the blogging account of technology website 36kr.com. The chopsticks, which were unveiled last week, have several sensors in them that can detect things like the quality and volume of oil, salt and water in a dish, as well as the temperature and pH.