Remember WeChat? Here’s our post on it: Weixin or WeChat. We’ve had a lot of fun with this mobile app, that’s for sure. Now there is a new addition that makes it a bit more fun, if that is possible. WeChat already has voice and video and text, of course, but what if you wanted to disguise your voice a bit, either to hide your real voice or to make your friends laugh? Well, you would add WeChat Voice. That’s how you’d do it.
WeChat Voice, click here, takes whatever message you record then changes it, according to your selection. It’s a bit like taking a photo on Instagram and using one of the photo filters to adjust it. It’s relatively simple now, basically speeding your voice up or down, adjusting the pitch, things like that. We assume that the voice choices will change as time goes by.
This is it!
WeChat Voice is available for both Android and iOS (Apple). As with WeChat/Weixin, the app is totally free. We feel that the app is safe, too. Tencent, the supplier, is a extremely large company in China and has a very good reputation. We never hesitate in using their software.
Android or iOS, choose your poison.
When you go to the WeChat Voice page, you can ever hear one voice selection. Just press the play button:
Press Play and hear one of the voices you can get.
Here’s how it all works. Open WeChat Voice and record your message, choose your filter using the selections provided then export it to WeChat. This is all done automatically. Once you have saved the message, WeChat Voice offers to open WeChat. Then, for a short time, both apps are open at once. You choose the contact you want to send the message to, then the message is uploaded and sent. Yes, it takes a while. WeChat Voice is good for occasional use but it sure won’t be a full-time part of WeChat. It just takes too long!
We can see another way to use WeChat Voice that might make more sense and be just as much fun. If you’re travelling with a group of friends, or simply sitting around in the lunch room, you could have some laughs by recording your voices. Alternatively, you could record a speaker’s voice, let’s say a teacher, and have some fun changing it around a bit.
While the Western world seems infatuated with Youtube, the Eastern world, at least those in China, cannot access it. The strange thing about this is that the West can access just about any site in China. What good is that you ask? Well, if you’re stuck on Youtube then you’re missing Youku!
Youku.com is China’s answer, some would say copy, of Youtube. While both sites show many of the same videos, there is a vast selection of Youku-only videos. Yes, the site is in Chinese but any searches can be done in English. If you’re looking for Jay Chou, for instance, just type in his name, forget about the fact that you don’t read or speak Chinese. Looking for episodes of Friends? Type in Friends. It’s that simple.
Baidu.com is a bit different. Baidu is China’s answer to Google. When you get to the site, you’re looking at what is essentially the same menu as Google. If you’re using Google Chrome, and you should be, here’s the magic it can do:
Oh no! It’s all in Chinese!Let Google work its magic and, suddenly, it’s all in English!
Once you’re feeling comfortable again, search for the videos you would like to see. Baidu is not as comprehensive as Youku, simply because Youku hosts its own videos while Baidu searches many other Chinese sites for its resources. We’ve only mentioned Youku, since it’s the most user-friendly, but there are many other Chinese video sites. We’d recommend that you stick with Youku, however. Some other Chinese sites, just like their counterparts in the West, are full of malware and adware. Stay safe!
Next time, we’ll show you how to record some of these videos to your computer. We’ll also take another look at downloading Facebook photo albums. We’ve had an update from one of the programmers of a plug-in we wrote about a few weeks ago. Stay tuned!
Besides QQ, Renren and Wiexin/WeChat and the other social networking sites mentioned in our last post, China continues to introduce new ones and, believe it or not, many old sites have existed for years. Here are some of them:
1.Youku has been around since 2006 and is an almost identical copy of Youtube. The difference is that Youku offers visitors full-length movies and TV shows, and yes, most have Chinese sub-titles, which Youtube cannot because of copyright issues. Although the site is in Chinese, you can search for videos using English words. A recent search brought up Big Daddy, albeit with Arabic sub-titles, which was streamed from Youku’s partner site Tudou.com. The video ran for 99 minutes straight, it wasn’t cut up into sections. Some videos are blocked, depending on your IP address, but most are available for viewing anywhere in the world.
Youku is Youtube but different.
2. Sina.com is described as an ‘infotainment’ site. Consider it like Msn.com and you’ll get the general idea. On Sina, you’ll get lots of news about China but you’ll also be able to read about world news with a twist; it’s all from a Chinese approved point of view. In the West, our news is uncensored but, as you all know, the truth is often adjusted by the companies that own the media site. Fox tells us the news through its point of view as does CNN, MSNBC and so on. Sina isn’t any different, when you look at it like that. Aside from news stories, you’ll be able to catch up on the latest sports and entertainment news. Everything has to be translated, of course, but if you are using Google Chrome, you’ll be fine.
Sina is the main news, weather, sports and entertainment site in China
3. Baidu is about as close to Google as you can get but with one big difference. On Baidu, users can search for MP3s, not just videos, but straight MP3s. We checked out some Bon Jovi songs and found a link to www.kuwo.cn. Sure enough, there was an MP3 player complete with karaoke lyrics as the music played. For each search result there is a ‘Play all’ button to stream all the songs on the page. Searching for images on Baidu is quite different from Google. A search brings up full size images instead of a page of thumbnails. Users can easily scroll down the page and see full versions of each photo, then click on the one that matches their search query.
Consider Baidu as Google on steroids. It’s a copy but it’s an improvement, too.
4. Zhan.renren.com is a combination of Tumblr and Pinterest, in our estimation. Linked with Renren.com, Zhan.renren allows users to share photos, comments, profound thoughts and videos on a single page. Like Twitter and Weibo, users ‘follow’ pages and are updated on the page’s status through renren. Some of the pages are incredible, really, full of fashion photography, classic autos and every other topic under the sun. Some pages are simple, others are very ornate, just as they are in Tumblr. If you have a perception of China and its citizens as being somewhat backward, you’d better reconsider. Zhan’s pages reflect an intelligence and an appreciation of art, music and culture that you’d be hard-pressed to equal on Western social networking sites.
Google Chrome will translate these sites for you.
5. China’s version of Ebay, at least one of them, is Taobao.com. Unlike Ebay, most of the items on Taobao are new and vendors sell everything from underwear to guitars at incredibly cheap prices. Taobao isn’t a store, just as Ebay isn’t. When you buy something, you’re dealing with a vendor, a private individual or company that uses Taobao as a gateway to their online shop. Millions of Chinese own shops on Taobao, while more millions of Chinese shop there. Shipping is the big problem if you want to get things into the West but if you’re looking for new products, Taobao is the place to go. As with Ebay, the seller’s reputation is how you judge whether your transaction will be satisfactory or not. Almost everything is sold at a fixed price, very few items are on auction. If you think of Taobao as a village market, a huge one, you’ll get a better picture of it. For wholesale purchases, Alibaba is the place to go.
Much of Alibaba is in English. We are the market they want to break into.
6. Alibaba.com is where China’s manufacturers meet the world. Again, Alibaba is a gateway, not a manufacturing company. They’ve set up thousands of sites for small, medium and large manufacturers to sell their products to the world. Instead of each company having an individual site, and some do, Alibaba brings people to their door, lets them search for items on their main site and then directs the search to a group of manufacturer’s shops. If you’re looking for drill presses, coolers, toys or anything in between, Alibaba is the place to go. It’s not for individuals, however. We’re talking bulk orders here, not piece by piece.
Not as boring as Ebay, take a look at Taobao and discover another world.
We’ve listed some of the larger and more interesting sites here but why not go exploring yourself? China’s Internet presence is vast, interesting and completely different from anything you’re experienced before. Hopefully, we’ve captured your interest. If you come across something interesting, share it here and we’ll check it out.
Our post on locking your Qzone was correct but one reader couldn’t duplicate one of the menus so here we are again. We’ll post another path to your security settings in case you can’t get to them as per the previous blog entry. Here we go:
1. Open your Qzone. Your main page will look like this but you can get to the security menu from any page:
This is the area that you want to find at the top of the page.
2. Hover your cursor (mouse) over the third set of symbols to bring up this menu:
Hover over the third set of symbols, underlined above, then click the circled symbol.
3. On the next page, look for the set of symbols on the right. Here they are:
Look for the set of symbols that we’ve circled and click on them.
4. Once you click the circled symbols, this page will come up. What you are doing here is finding your profile settings and editing them, just as you do in Facebook or any other social networking site:
Under the padlock icon, click the first set of symbols.
5. Clicking on the circled set of symbols will bring up the same menu as shown in our post about locking your profile. That article is here: Locking your Qzone
This is the menu:
Hovering over the circled set of symbols will bring out the menu just below it. This is where you can lock your zone.
TIP: As we said earlier, these settings are no different than the ones on Facebook or your MSN zone, basically the same as any other social networking site. The difference is that these settings are all in Chinese. If you use Google Chrome, the job is a bit easier. Part of the fun of all of this is getting to know some Chinese symbols and working out these settings on your own. It’s a mystery, right? Everyone loves a mystery. We hope this helped you. Let us know if it didn’t.
Estimates vary but the general consensus is that over half a billion Chinese are active Internet users. Of that number, several hundred million use mobile devices to access the web. Taking those massive numbers into account, it’s not hard to figure out which country in the world has the most dynamic selection of social media apps and sites. If you think the Facebook and Youtube and the be all and end all of social media, you’d better think again. Computers Made Simple will guide you through these various apps and sites over the next few posts. Hopefully, we can un-mystify China for you. Here we go!
TIP: Before we begin, we should emphasize that our browser of choice for anything Chinese is Google Chrome. Why? Because it’s the only browser we’ve found that instantly, more or less, translates full pages for us. Every Chinese site is, well, in Chinese. Almost all of the apps are in Chinese as well. Kind of makes sense, right? Using Chrome as your browser and installing Google Translate as an app on your mobile device will make your forays into the hectic world of Chinese social media a lot easier. You could spend years learning Chinese writing but we think our way is faster.
1. Start with QQ. We’ve written about QQ before so read up on it before you continue. That post is HERE . Head over to read it, we’ll wait. Use QQ to interact directly with users all over the world. Don’t get hung up on age, either. QQ users are made up of every age group and demographic you can imagine. Many seniors in China are very capable Internet users. If you want to chat with someone in Mongolia or a Uyghur in Hunan, QQ is the place to start. Virtually all QQ users are Chinese but if you use QQ International with its internal translator, conversation is quick and easy…if not totally coherent because of the literal translations. While you may have to say the same thing in a different way, communication is almost always successful and very interesting.
2. QQ is made by Tencent, Inc. Tencent also brings us Weixin or WeChat, probably the best social app for mobile devices in existence. Yes, we’ve written about that before so check the post on that HERE. Since QQ and Weixin/WeChat are linked, you can chat inside of QQ or on Weixin, you use the same password for each. When one of your friends is using Weixin, a symbol will show up on your QQ friend list:
All of these QQ users are now signed into Weixin/WeChat. You can chat with them on your mobile device or in QQ.
3. Tencent has a few other offerings, including their own version of Weibo (think of Twitter but in Chinese) and Facebook. The Facebook clone is available through your Qzone and is called Pengyou. While we have accounts on both sites, we prefer the originals of these clones, Sina Weibo and Renren (the people network).
4. Sina Weibo is extremely popular in China with about 300 million registered users and around 100 million small ‘tweets’ every day. Weibo is the Chinese term for micro-blogging. We don’t think of Twitter as micro-blogging but Twitter and Weibo are pretty much the same. One of the big differences, however, is that photos and videos are placed right on the main page. To view either, you simply click on them and they will open up, no need to go to another page. That alone saves time and makes the experience substantially more fun than Twitter. Here’s what we mean:
Click on the photo, a magnifying cursor shows it can be enlarged.Yes, there are cute bunnies on Weibo too.
Weibo is tightly controlled by China’s government. Posts and posters are regularly censored or harmonized as they say in China. No matter, if you’re a regular user you’ll discover more about China in a few hours than you would in month’s searching a wiki.
5. Renren is the equivalent of Facebook. In our opinion, Renren is not simply a clone, it’s an improvement, with many features that we wish Facebook would adopt. Renren is essentially what Facebook was in the beginning, mainly for university students. Facebook widened its fan base but the younger Renren is still true to its origins. That doesn’t mean that you can’t join up and see what the other side is doing, however. Feel free to open an account and spend some time learning the ropes. What you’ll find on Renren is initially similar to Facebook but, bit by bit, you’ll begin to get a sense of the Chinese psyche, complete with girls posting pics of themselves then saying that they are fat, hoping that their friends will say that they aren’t. Tread carefully and fairly soon you’ll be welcomed into the community. Some users may resent the intrusion by a foreigner but most will make you feel welcome and try to help you if you have a problem with the Renren interface. As with any new forum that you join, spend some time getting to know the rules before you dive in. Above all, be yourself and show respect to others. You’re a visitor here.
TIP: Renren is substantially more open than Facebook, at least as far as nudity is concerned. Political criticism, however, can be censored/harmonized and sometimes can result in the suspension of your account. We constantly test the limits of censorship on one of our accounts and are amazed, quite frankly, at the enormous difference between Renren and Facebook. After a few months on Renren, you’ll spend less and less time on Facebook, we’d bet. Facebook will seem very Victorian after just a short time on Renren. While China moves ahead, the U.S. is slowly heading backwards, it seems.
That’s enough for this post. Next time we’ll cover more social media sites and apps from China. Make sure you come back to visit.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
