With it now certain that China’s popular Weibo (microblogging) services – prime among them being Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) and Tencent’s (HKG:0700) – will have to implement real-name ID checks in the coming months, it appears that the system will not come cheap.

Twitter’s slick new redesign has brought it – visually and practically – closer to China’s most dynamic microblogging platform, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo. It shows, perhaps, that Sina’s rapid rate of change on its most popular service is now actually leading the way for Twitter. How the tables have turned!

Twitter apparently allows its clients to buy adverts using rivals’ brand names. I noticed UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s had bought ads on Twitter.com against searches for rivals like “Tesco”, “Waitrose” and “Lidl”.

The world’s largest microblog service does not want to take on Twitter on its home turf. But it does want to further limit Twitter’s chance of success in the Far East.

The TV engagement product co-founded by ex BBC iPlayer chief Anthony Rose launched on Thursday evening to ride the booming trend in two-screen social TV interaction.

Social referrals are driving up online video consumption, while TV viewers are increasingly multi-tasking, according to two separate research pieces from YouGov and Hitwise published on Monday. Here, we digest the key points…

Inside Spotify, staff say their big U.S. delay left them “constipated”. Now that its American passage has been unblocked, Spotify is free to unload itself on to consumers. But, with its new Facebook partnership, the music service has excreted a big shower of poo on their heads.

While surfing around Tencent Weibo today, we realized something unique about the Chinese microblogging site – it has launched an option to view it in English. Which means that it has beaten its sworn rival Sina Weibo to the punch.

Twitter was due to roll out its first advertising for testing in the UK on Thursday, with more to come in the next few weeks, marking the network’s first ad sell outside the U.S..

Twitter is now offering its web interface in Simplified Chinese. But a two-year-old block on Twitter being accessible in China has allowed Sina’s homegrown Weibo to flourish - and now it’s already blossoming in to far more than a Twitter-style microblogging tool...

Dublin- and Rome-based blog network and Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) lookalike Populis is buying its second blog network of the year.

George W. Bush’s younger brother Neil has just started microblogging - not on Twitter, nor in English, but on Sina (NSDQ: SINA) Weibo, in Chinese.

The government has climbed down on plans to ban suspected rioters from using social networking websites in times of civil unrest.

Russia’s leading search engine is making a foray in the nascent market segment of socially-organised news delivery, by buying The Tweeted Times.

The online audio-sharing market’s early darling, AudioBoo, is coming under increasing pressure from well-funded competitor SoundCloud.

Facebook and Twitter are preparing to face down UK government ministers over calls to ban people from social networks or shut their websites down in times of civil unrest.

Sina’s Weibo microblogging service isn’t even available in English yet - but that hasn’t stopped it reaching 200 million users in two years, nor from flaunting that growth in the heart of New York.

The UK’s Home Secretary will meet media and social media companies regarding blocking access during emergency situations, in the wake of England’s mass looting this week.

The operator of China’s biggest instant messaging service says its growth has slowed due to “increased scale and reduced growth rate in the internet market in China”. The notion China’s internet market may be slowing is surprising, and new.