Chinese 'rival' beats Twitter in messages per second

Thanks to the Chinese New Year, Twitter has been dethroned in terms of messages sent per second: the distinction now supposedly belongs to its counterpart in China.

 

Sina Weibo, one of China’s premiere microblogs and Twitter alternatives, started the New Year with 32,312 messages per second, tech site Mashable reported.

 

Mashable said this handily beat Twitter’s 25,088 messages sent per second last December in Japan, during a TV screening of the anime movie "Castle in the Sky."

 

Mashable cited a report by Chinese news site DoNews that 481,207 messages were sent in the first minute of the Year of th Dragon.

 

This was about three times the number of messages sent during the first minute of the last New Year, and reflected the site’s 296-percent increase in users during 2011.

 

Presently, Mashable said Sina Weibo has 250 million registered users, making the site slightly smaller than its largest domestic rival, Tencent Weibo, which has 300 million registered users.

 

But DoNews said Sina Weibo is the more used of the two, seeing some 100 million users visit the site each day.

 

On the other hand, Mashable said the coming Superbowl on Feb. 5 may give US-based Twitter a chance to catch up. — TJD, GMA News