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Now that Twitter has a separate app to test new ideas, here’s a list of 10 feature ideas from "China’s Twitter" (Weibo) that push forward the user experience. 👇
1/ Lots of categories for discovering content. Instead of just 4 categories in ⚡️moments, there are 66 categories ranging from anime to beauty to parenting. Which means you don’t have to follow anyone and can still read the best of the web by hour, day, week. 
2/ Community pages, THOUSANDS of them. For religious groups, LGBT communities, artist fan clubs, you name it. It’s like having a dedicated page for every major hashtag. Plus, every post you write in a community group is default excluded from your public posts.
How liberating would it be to post on any topic in a community page and not worry about being off-brand or annoying your followers? This little tweak lets users show off more parts of their personality, not just the stuff they’re known for.
3/ Influencers can sell paid memberships -- almost like a closed paid FB group. Paying members get access to exclusive chat groups, invite-only livestreams, Q&A content. The platform takes a 30% cut.
4/ Pay to follow people anonymously. Paying a $2 monthly fee gets you VIP membership where following 30 people anonymously is just one of the perks. *Editing posts is another VIP perk.* 🤠📝
5/ Choose who you share content to. Rather than post to everyone, you can set up a private Friends Circle and make your content only visible to some. I suspect all social networks will eventually go this route, content creation is too stifled otherwise.
7/ Mini-apps within an app -- there are sections dedicated to livestreaming, movies, real estate, music, finance, food, travel, charity, etc. Each section has small features specific to the topic.
Finance section has stock indices, stock quotes, and you can follow stock experts. Real estate section lets you browse listings. Shopping section has a bestseller leaderboard, and top items from influencers.
8/ Diff types of posts. In addition to posting pics, polls and videos, users can also post photo albums, Q&A (where you can earn $$), product reviews, cash giveaways and more. The cash giveaways can be set to require a passcode or only be claimed by long time followers.
9/ 1 to many messaging --> brands and influencers can send a message to all of their followers’ inbox. This can be used for sharing coupons, events, promos or content links. Kind of like your own follower email list 💌
10/ Better links to commerce platforms to enable shopping. Imagine if you could easily link Amazon, etsy, ebay products on your posts and have the pics and descriptions show up properly.
Oh, and threaded comments work very well on Weibo, so I'm really glad that Twttr is testing that out!
Looking at Weibo reminds me consumer social media isn’t dead, there’s still soo many more features to build. Some inspired by China, some not (thx @avesegal!). Which one's your favorite, and what’s on your feature wishlist?
