Sina Weibo gets Google+ style makeover

Massively popular Chinese social network Sina Weibo has released a new web version which allows people to select who they share content with, similar to Google+.

The microblogging service, which is often compared to Twitter, has been aggressively pushing the new format with banner ads. Once someone clicks on the ad, they’re taken through the process of upgrading.

While the ability to share selectively, think Circles in Google+, is the biggest change there are also a number of aesthetic changes. Weibo users can for instance now get a large banner image like they can on Facebook. Profile photos are also a little bigger now.

Unlike a number of Chinese social networks, which are outright clones of their Western counterparts, Sina Weibo seems to have a knack for taking bits and pieces from other social networks and adding them to its feature list.

In July it took a leaf out of Twitter’s book and went the ‘sponsored tweets’ route. It also launched a social credit card a couple of months ago.

We’ve been anticipating the new version of Sina Weibo for some time now and judging by the screenshots to have come out so far, the finished product is more or less the same as what we got peeks of during development.

The social network has over 300-million users although, as we’ve previously noted, it’s unclear how many of those are actually active.