Weibo started on Aug. 14, 2009, soon after social media site Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail were banned from the country.
The ban on Twitter did not come as a surprise to a blogger named Michael Anti. He said, "Twitter is a tool which can put all the sensitive things and sensitive guys together, very quickly. That's the very thing that the Chinese government doesn't want to see in China.
Weibo was born as a Twitter clone with an added comment feature. Users can share photos, retweets, and links.
However, Sina Weibo was just one of the modules that the creators intended to do for another site called "pengyou", or translated as "friend" in English. "Pengyou" never took off.
By the fall of 2009, actors like Yao Chen subscribed to Weibo. This guaranteed the site of many followers that now has 79.8 million followers.
Gong Min, a marketing manager at Weibo, said, "Charles Chao said the long-term vision for Sina is to be a respectful new media company. New products should have connections to our core competence. As a successful internet portal, Sina has confidence in media."
Charles Chao is the CEO of Weibo.
On February 2011, American actor Tom Cruise joined Weibo and had 50,000 followers in two days. At present, his account is followed by 5.4 million fans.
The social media site has also been part of many scandalous stories that gave Weibo a solid footing in China's online universe.
Billionaire investor Wang Gongquan, in March 2011, posted on his Weibo account, "I am giving up everything and eloping with Wang Qin. I feel ashamed and so am leaving without saying goodbye. I kneel down and beg forgiveness!"
Wang Qin is his mistress. His wife was not mentioned in the post.
From inception till now, Weibo now has 282 million users. Actress Yao Chen's almost 80 million followers exceed U.S. President's Barack Obama's 76.6 million users in Twitter.