Microsoft Offers Twitter-style Service in China

From PC World: Microsoft has launched a microblog-style service in China based on Windows Live Messenger, expanding the social-networking functions linked to the chat software in a country where it is a hit.

The new service, which is called MSN Juku and is now in beta, lets users post 140-character messages to an update screen that slowly scrolls old messages to the right. The service automatically links users with people on their Live Messenger contact lists, whose updates also appear on the scrolling timeline. Posts are also stacked top-to-bottom and display only their first few words when they appear close together. Pointing the mouse at a condensed message shows its full version.

MSN China, the Microsoft joint venture that developed the new product, insisted it is not a microblog service. "Juku is a local innovation developed by MSN China ... based on Windows Live Messenger networks," a company representative said in an e-mail.

But Juku, whose name uses the Chinese characters for "gathering" and "cool", is similar enough to a microblog site that one local media report called it a "bandit" version of Plurk, a Twitter-like service popular in Asia. The Chinese term for "bandit" is slang for a product similar to that of an established brand and is most often used to describe knock-off mobile phones.

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