What the hell is Weibo?

From opening a Twitter account in 2007 to now, I’ve used at least 10 different microblogging accounts. Among them, the one I’ve stuck with the longest is probably Tencent Weibo, which I started using in May this year and used continuously for 3 months.

Of course, if you count my personal microblog, this record is even longer, reaching 6 months.

I started tweeting just to follow the trend, then I messed around with follow5, but I never really got into Fanfou and Jiwai (though I did use fanfou.es and fanfou.de to tweet for a while).

Later, in September last year, I saw Sina’s internal testing of Weibo and stayed up late waiting for a new invite code to check it out. After that, I just hung an RSS feed on it and never logged in again. It seems that account posted 400 tweets and had over 60 followers…

After that, it was Tencent’s damn Weibo. I got the invite code in April, and back then, you could often see Ma Huateng and others actively promoting it. I used it purely because it was fast, and from May to July, Tencent Weibo was in internal testing, so the user quality was relatively high, and the tweets were somewhat interesting. After it opened for registration, everything went downhill, and now it’s all about vulgarity. To summarize, I posted over 1500 tweets on Tencent Weibo, all manually, and had over 1000 followers.

As for my private microblog, I set it up after getting tired of Tencent Weibo, and after that, it was just a solo game.

I played alone for almost two months, then got bored and started looking for changes.

Coinciding with changing my web space, I turned the original faxue.info into a sub-site of ifosu.com: notepad.ifosu.com, positioning it as a notepad for myself, and in fact, I had been using it for that purpose before.

Since it’s a notepad, there’s no need to be restrained. Just write daily logs and jot down some useful information, that’s all.

…Annoying!!

The most annoying thing for me is overlapping functionalities. For example, this notepad function—I’m also using Greader and Maiku, and both are things I can’t easily give up. They are clearly more user-friendly than notepad.ifosu.com. It’s hard to just throw something away and make a complete switch, but what’s even more frustrating is that the overlapping functionalities only occur in parts of each product! FTA!

Greader is obviously for saving entire articles, though you can also add some light notes. But Greader is just too massive. Whenever I try to search for some information I’ve seen before, nine times out of ten, I can’t find it. Over 1000 RSS feeds, thousands of articles updated daily. It’s hard to say I should drastically cut down on Greader’s subscriptions, though in reality, I only read a few dozen articles each time, but I can’t bear to delete 80-90% of my RSS feeds at once.

Maiku, on the other hand, overlaps with Greader in terms of saving articles, but it has its advantages: it can save attachments, its interface is very simple and convenient, it can output public links for each saved segment at any time, and it doesn’t face the risk of being blocked like Greader.

As for notepad.ifosu.com, it’s built on Wordpress. After logging in, there’s a big posting box on the homepage, and I’ve also enabled quick posting and email posting. Especially the email posting feature, which is now a great help—I can input content to be saved in a browser plugin and send it to a secret email to update immediately.

Looking at it all, I’m now struggling with the idea of cutting down on these things, but I don’t know where to start, because once you have an emotional attachment and a foundation, it’s hard to change.

As for those damn Weibos, I can’t be bothered to manage them anymore.

FML.! Tonight is particularly frustrating.

It’s worth mentioning that the reason I don’t use Weibo to replace the notepad function is entirely because Tencent Weibo doesn’t support searching for content I’ve posted (Sina seems to, but it’s too slow), which is ridiculous.