techblog86

What do Huxley, Orwell and the Twitter user @baixiaoci have in common?

@baixiaoci started out with a tweet (in Chinese) at 22:00 last night (August 18, 2009), which read (translated):

There’s something unfortunate about the Chinese over the Americans: the predictions of both Orwell and Huxley have become reality in China Switch on television, and you get Brave New World. Surf the Web, and it’s 1984.

Your tech blogger retweeted this in the morning hours today (August 19, 2009). This tweet got retweeted upwards of 20 or even more than 20 times in a single day, probably setting a brand-new record…

@baixiaoci, by the way, is from Shenzhen, but is presently in Shanghai as his tweets have him. He’s a photographer and has a site — 50mm.cn as well as another one at baixiaoci.com.

See, we had to promote this guy. He’s now famous. With just one tweet.

Ever wonder why Fanfou was shut down? The site was full of political tweets flying to and fro. Never mind it had a Chinese ICP site — it was nixed, no questions asked. With the PRC’s Big Sixty coming in this close, those at the top are hoping that there’ll be “nothing big” that could get out of control — not even with 300 million virtual beings.

Today was just another day in the Chinese Twittersphere — except for one thing: the Tan Zuoren case started and, as usual, some of the Chinese tweeps started tweeting about the case. We had reports of hushed courts, police brutality and other disturbing tweets coming in this side of the Pacific, whereas the tweets coming in from the US were much closer to home — and were less political.

I tweeted about this some time back. The Chinese Twittersphere seems to have a particular political interest vested amongst the community. Yet in the US, Twitter’s used to describe things that may not be all that political. It’s not that the US and politics don’t mix on Twitter — that’s what put @BarackObama on the map. Yet, the intensity of politics is lesser felt outside the PRC — especially in the USA.

Just a year ago this day, the Beijing Olympics got off to a start. Whether it was a bang or a whimper (as in the massively stepped security procedures and almost-impossible-to-get PRC visas) — that we’ll let you decide. But there’s a hashtag that was part of the day: #080808.

Not just that. Everyone China or even remotely Chinese-related had #080808 on their avatars. @thecarol from Taiwan did that. @isaac did it. Everyone in the region went #080808, thanks to @flypig’s idea.

The irony of this is that, in the name of the Big Sixty coming later this year, the #080808 hashtag — along with everything else Twitter-related — appears to have been harmonized. Oh yeah — and also the Internet censorship. You could access sites you couldn’t access otherwise in China a year ago. YouTube or even BBC Chinese? Yours last year.

#Harminator’s this year.

The skies outside today in Beijing appear just as gloomy as it was a year ago. (Obviously, and we’re going off at a slant here — for the best blue skies, come in winter around January or February. Satisfaction guaranteed.)

Talk about Twitter in China these days! First it went down in early June (password here had something to do with Tian’anmen), then it went down right after Urumqi shook with riots. Now Twitter itself has been compromised with denial-of-service attacks, and just lately all passwords have been reset.

Here’s how sorry the situation has gotten as of late:

• In all of this: Twitter (as in the twitter.com site) has been blocked in China.
• Late Thursday: Access to iTweet, Hahlo and some other third-party Twitter sites became cumbersome.
• Early Friday: iTweet, Hahlo pretty much dead by mid-morning.
• Late Friday: PeopleBrowsr looking OK, but still very iffy. Ping.fm does not post all tweets going through.
• Very late Friday: Twitter working again via iTweet and Hahlo.
• Early Saturday: iTweet, Hahlo working again.
• 09:49 Saturday morning: Twitter sends password resets, access to iTweet and Hahlo die again.

We’re pointing a finger at Twitter directly. Politically speaking, if you could save Iran, why not save China?

Thanks to @POPOEVER, @daygan and others for helping your tweeter out through all this.

It seems like it. As this post is going to press, it looks like not just Twitter itself is harmonized, but that third-party clients and access points, including iTweet and Hahlo, have also become — more harmonious. (For those of you just starting out, anything harmonious or harmonized in the Chinese Interwebs means that the site has fallen victim to the Harmonious Society — as in a society that regards these suspect sites as websites non gratia. In layman terms, anything harmonized is blocked in China.)

A chat with some tweeps in the People’s Republic reveal something that can only be called self-harmonization: it looks like, State-side, something’s awry with Twitter. See, not only does Beijing think Twitter is — can we say this — harmonious?

Your blogger-cum-tweeter needs bed time off (and nope, bed tweeting is not part of the program), so here’s hoping that the Twitterverse returns intact tomorrow morning!

It’s at this point where we start feeling a bit sorry for Xiaonei — once “detested” and ridiculed as the Chinese carbon copy of Facebook. As we’ve reported a bit earlier on techblog86, Xiaonei as we know it right now might get harmonized — or see a lot of changes underway.

The changes are more visible to new users than to existing users. This is what the page looks if you’re not signed in:

There’s a new addition, however:

…and if you click that, you see this:

No joke. Xiaonei’s becoming Ren Ren Wang (人人网; 人人 means “everyone” in Chinese) — and that could see quite a shift in the Chinese SNS world…

Updates:

• Registered users are seeing changes in the main page while logged in:
  

Web 2.0 must-haves or “security headaches”? They’re the latter in an increasingly sensitive China — being blocked as they are in the PRC — and they could get blocked in America as well. The United States Military is thinking of a block that could envelope itself around Twitter and Facebook as well.

Boing Boing has it that the US military is no less harmonious, so to speak, than its Chinese civilian counterpart. It quotes Defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman as saying that that “the Pentagon may impose a very wide ban on Twitter and Facebook for security reasons”.

Obviously, censoring in the military is at least a bit more reasonable than stopping the citizenry from going to sites that could we — can we say this? — ”reactionary”. But once you start censoring — it’ll take quite an effort to wean away from the practise. Especially if it moves into civilian territory…

We have a scary tweet coming in from @xinhaiguang on Twitter, who may have it that — Xiaonei might get harmonized. What’s known for sure is that big university-centered SNS networks won’t see major developments, as development in this direction has been frozen.

Apparently, hard hit will be both Baidu’s University Bar as well as Xiaonei itself. Oak Pacific Interactive, who’s the company which made Xiaonei possible, might even be on the verge of announcing a major shift in directions.

Not sure is just how much this will go — will we see the annihilation of the SNS in China? Xiaonei has come under fire previously as a Shanzhai Facebook. But to shut the SNS down and to nix millions of innocent accounts would be taking the whole thing too far.