Baidu Shuoba

» see t.baidu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The signup wall is the whole story, so start there. To get an account on Baidu Shuoba you needed a Baidu ID, an invitation code, a mobile number that received the verification SMS and stayed bound to the account, your real name, a photograph of your face, and a resident identity card number that was checked against the Ministry of Public Security's database. Clear all of that and you got a small check mark next to your handle. This was September 2010, and it was voluntary.

The English name was Baidu Talk, which is why it sat at t.baidu.com, and the man in charge of it spent the launch period insisting it was not what it looked like. Mai Tian, general manager of Baidu's social networking unit, told reporters flatly that Shuoba was not a microblog and was not Twitter. It had a posting box with a character limit and a timeline of the people you followed, so nobody was persuaded.

The one feature that was genuinely its own came straight out of the phone binding. Two users could offer each other their mobile numbers, and if both agreed the numbers were revealed, so a regular user gradually accumulated a real address book of verified people. That is a thing no microblog did, and it is only possible on a network where everybody has already proved who they are.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the signup form ~

Everything that went wrong traces to that form. Chinese internet users in 2010 had no habit of handing an ID number to a consumer website, and the growth numbers were ugly from the start. There were smaller indignities on top: until 27 April 2011 your profile lived at t.baidu.com followed by a string of digits with no option for a custom address, five digits if you got in during the closed beta and six after it opened, so nobody could tell anybody else where to find them without copying a number.

Baidu did eventually blink. A revision in April 2011 kept the verification system but made it optional, and custom domains arrived the same month. Neither change moved anything: the accounts reporting on it afterwards say user growth still never broke through. The people who had refused the form in 2010 were not sitting around waiting for it to be relaxed in 2011.

~ the microblog war ~

Sina Weibo had launched in August 2009 and by 2010 was pulling in the celebrities and the news cycle. Sohu and NetEase both fielded competing microblogs, and so did Tencent. Every one of those is buried here now. Baidu came to that fight as a search company whose social assets were Tieba and Baidu Space, and it chose to enter through the one door Chinese users were least willing to walk through.

Mai Tian resigned on 22 July 2011. On 8 August the posting entrance was shut with a notice, registration and verification stopped, users were given a window to export what they had written, and anyone who logged in was bounced to Baidu Nuomi, the group-buying site, which is a strange place to send a person who came to read a timeline. Everything ended on 22 August. Four months after that, Beijing's municipal regulations began requiring microblog users to register under their real identities across the board. Shuoba had asked for exactly that and been ignored; when it stopped being a request the product had already been switched off.

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