Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, is testing an Instagram like app called Lvzhou(Oasis in English). Now only invited people can access the app. You can download the app on App Store if you are an iPhone user or you can download online if you are an Android user.
The vision of this app is to allow users to discover beautiful world, users can post photos or short videos and share with the rest of the world. Before you can access the app, you have to obtain an invitation code shared by your friends.
Each user can invite 10 friends to join by sharing a 6 character invitation code. Once the invitation is verified, one can get into the login page.
Currently there are 4 different login methods available: mobile phone number, Weibo account, WeChat account and QQ account. Post login, you will be quite familiar with the interface if you are also an user of Instagram.
So each story/phone will appear as a card and followers can post comments and post likes etc. But it doesn't support direct message yet so one cannot send direct message to another one.
The process of posting a new story/photo is also similar to what Instagram supports, you can choose photo from gallery and edit the photo and add tags and add location information etc. Once the photo is posted, you can view the story like below.
Also, you can navigate to your home page where you can find your stories, your followers and your followings etc.
The biggest difference might be that Lvzhou has a loyalty program where users can earn Water Drop(some kind of rewards). It is a kind of digital asset where one can use it to give rewards to other people, redeem goods etc in the future. The total quantity of water drop is fixed and how much one can get depends on how active he is on the platform. It is generated every four hours and they will evaporate if they are not redeemed within 3 days.
Based on this design, it seems Lvzhou would build lots of features around this program and incentive users and encourage user to participate in the platform.
Another difference between Lvzhou and Instagram would be the discovery tab where Lvzhou shows some description of the story when recommending the stories while Instagram would only show the photo itself.
Since currently it's just being tested within a limited scope by invitation only, there is no official public launch date released yet and the features may change when it;s public available later.
This is a step for this Chinese social media company to expand its social coverage to other areas after its Weibo platform. It might become another multi-million user platform where its Weibo platform is at the moment.
