Sina Weibo breaks Twitter's record of posts per second

Sina Weibo, a popular microblog in China has overtaken Twitter in number of posts sent per second. According to Chinese news site, DoNews, Sina Weibo is the second largest microblog in China with 250 million users and it is the most used of all microblogs in China with 100 million visitors on the site everyday. Twitter has a comparable active user base at 100 million, though as of 2011, it had 300 million registered users. Sina Weibo saw a record number of posts sent per second on Monday. The posts were related to Chinese New Year. The site saw 32,312 posts sent per second. Meanwhile, Twitter's record is 25,088 tweets per second, which were sent in Japan last December, during a screening on TV of an anime movie, Castles in the Sky. On the 31st of December, Twitter crashed with 16,197 tweets sent per second in Japan for New Year's Eve.

Sina Weibo breaks Twitter's record

The first minute of the New Year saw 4,81,207 posts being sent. That is about three times the number of posts sent in the first minute of the last Chinese New Year. The number of users on Sina Weibo had increased by 296% in 2011. Sina Weibo is large enough that organizations like the International Monetary Fund, Louis Vuitton and Unilever have flocked to the service. With Twitter being banned in China, even celebrities like actor Tom Cruise and tennis player, Maria Sharapova have opened Sina Weibo accounts to stay in touch with the Chinese public.

Sina Weibo, according to a report by China Internet Network Information Center, is still only the second most populated microblog in the country. Its competitor is Tencent Weibo, which has 300 million registered users, just 50 million more than Sina Weibo. The report also said that China has 513 million Internet users and Internet penetration stands at about 38.3 percent of the overall population. 48.7 percent of Internet users in China are microblog users.