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"Sina, China's equivalent to Twitter, has jumped on the mobile messaging bandwagon after it began promoting its new app\u00A0WeMeet, known as 'Weimi' in Chinese.\r\n\r\nWeMeet has actually been around since April and is developed by 20-person Hangzhou Kuyue Technology, a team incubated within Sina, according to Marbridge. Nonetheless the official 'launch' is significant since it follows Sina CEO Charles Chao revealing\u00A0imminent plans to\u00A0launch a social app to compete with the mobile apps that he previously admitted\u00A0are causing Weibo users to spend less time on the service.\r\n\r\nWeibo\u00A0has over\u00A0500\u00A0million registered users, more than\u00A050 million of which are active each day, but it is under pressure from\u00A0WeChat, the mobile messaging app developed by Chinese Internet giant\u00A0Tencent, which has 235 million monthly active users\u00A0across China and overseas.\r\n\r\nThe WeMeet app links up to Weibo, as you'd expect, and has a particular focus on group chat.\u00A0It supports all the standard messaging types and lets users\u00A0import contacts from Weibo as well as the address book on their device.\u00A0Interestingly, it has Snapchat-style self-destructing messages, RSS feed support and numerous public interest groups where users can voice their opinions.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nChao will hope WeMeet steels up Sina's social push in the face of increasing competition, but the truth is that it is very late to the game. China Telecom even beat Sina to the punch,\u00A0launching its own app\u00A0last week,\u00A0while WeChat is beginning to strike partnerships with operators -- all of which means promoting the app via Weibo alone is unlikely to turn WeMeet into a serious rival, Sina will need a real growth strategy and probably some luck too.\r\n\r\n\r\nFirst spotted by Technode, WeMeet is in Chinese only, however\u00A0it is available worldwide for\u00A0iOS\u00A0and Android which suggests that further language support could come later.\r\n\r\n\u27A4\u00A0WeMeet: iOS\u00A0| Android (APK)\r\n\r\nHeadline image via TNW\r\n\r\nDisclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our\u00A0Terms of Service."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/08/26/sina-chinas-answer-to-twitter-enters-the-mobile-messaging-battle-with-its-own-app/>