If you’ve watched Mission Impossible 4, aside from the action scenes, is there anything that kept you thinking after walking out of the cinema? Such as, is it possible for Tom Cruise to drive his car over a 100-meters drop and survive? Is a bullet still lethal when shot into water?

Well, there’s a website with the answers you’re looking for: it’s called Guokr.com.

While the investment world is fixated on Sina Weibo’s business model, Tencent Weibo is quietly improving its user experience. For Tencent, Weibo is not a product that needed to be urgently monetized, but one that can be perfected over time. CEO Pony Ma is also known as the company’s lead product manager.

Tencent Weibo is now the closest to the Twitter experience of any of the microblogs I’ve seen in China. Yet it also has special merits of its own.

The reign of the Sina Dynasty may be on the wane in the realm of Chinese microblogs. Regional warlords have risen rapidly to take advantage of weaknesses on the fringes of Sina’s empire. To add to Sina’s troubles, upstarts are recruiting confused citizenry in guerrilla warfare and sleeping Titans may be starting to stir.

The Pinterest sharing model is the latest trend in China’s startup scene, with no less than 20 Pinterest clones in existence. Some of them are following the classic cloning route, changing the UI only thinly, while the more intelligent clones are leveraging the Pinterest interface design for more outright commercial practices (like social shopping).

The entire concept focuses on building users based on interests rather than social networks, and it’s opened up new doors for China’s social startups.

It’s the Chinese Lunar New Year in China, the Year of Dragon, which feeds a television frenzy that culminates in CCTV’s (China Central Television) Spring Festival Show. Watching these shows I noticed that Tencent Weibo–not Sina–is the dominant partner (surely because they paid the most money).

In 2012, Tencent will continue to push forward aggressively in social and present a formidable challenge to Sina. In my first blog post of 2012, let’s have a look at how the two top microblog players in China will fare against each other.

A month ago, the user interface designer at the startup I’ve joined suggested that I give QQ Music a try. To be honest, I’m not a great fan of Tencent’s products, maybe because I live in Shanghai where people generally view Tencent as a lower-class brand, although that’s changing with Weixin.

Yet upon log-in to QQ Music, I was surprised by the Windows 8 Metro-style design, a slick interface that feels classy. Digging deeper, it turns out QQ Music’s mobile app is even more functional than stylish, one that I’ve continued to use since I first opened it up upon.

The Chinese government isn’t the only one listening in on Chinese netizens. Fortunately, CIC is a service of a far more benevolent kind. It’s a leader in China’s social media monitoring space, helping brands make sense of the online buzz.

Kantar Media’s acquisition indicates that China’s social media advertising space is taking off. In the US, there’s already a host of competitors in this space, including Radian6 which was acquired by Salesforce for $326 million last spring.

AdChina (易传媒), one of China’s top ad networks, has put together an overview of China’s digital advertising market. AdChina itself is a company to watch, a real Chinese IPO candidate that, unlike many others, rarely trumpets its own horn. I’ve highlighted a few of the key findings from the slideshare.

With Weixin, Tencent finally has a product for white-collars, an objective that had eluded the firm for over a decade. With Weixin Lifestyle, it’s building a brand for white-collars too. We at TechRice thinks that’s a very big deal.

On the heels of Google’s new social search features, I’d like to introduce a Chinese social search startup currently in closed beta: Yunyun.com (云云). Yunyun’s social search merges websites, question-and-answer (Q&A), and Weibo results. Yun means cloud in Chinese and Yunyun has lofty ambitions.