The 2012 Summer Olympics in London has been off and running since Friday and it is not a surprise that it is making huge numbers in the social networking world. This is basically the first Olympics with the social networking craze and they are taking full advantage of it on Twitter, Facebook, Goggle+, and even other networks like Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Just by the opening ceremony alone, nearly 119 million messages were sent via Sina Weibo in China, which is remarkable. While the majority of the messages were from China, about 114 million of them, England had 2.4 million messages sent and another 2.38 million messages were from here at the states. Comparing to Twitter however, they had about 9.7 million tweets about the Olympics that night. Then again, it is not really a fair comparison considering the population differences at China and other countries worldwide.

In terms of active users on Sina Weibo on that night, 24 million of them were active, which was up from 19 million the week prior. Videos on the microblogging site were at 49 million views as well, way more than the singing competition show “Voice of China,” their version of “The Voice” that we have here at the states. We will see if Sina Weibo breaks new records during the Olympics especially that China is always in contention for the most gold medals at these games. The last time there were record breaking numbers on the service was during Chinese New Year back in January. Social media is definitely a big part of this year’s summer games, but things have been overboard on Sina after a network overload disrupting GPS units of neighboring cyclists. Olympic officials urge users to take a breather in posting abusively about the games to save up network use in case of emergencies. Despite that soft warning, social media is going to play a role of how well these Olympics go if people are aware it as we see athletes and sports get usually trended. It is great to see Sina Weibo doing well during the games and hopefully other social networks that are similar are having the similar effect too.