China's Sina develops iPhone-like interface

Sina Mofun, similar to Yahoo Widgets, is a desktop widgets client, which closely integrated with Sina’s web 2.0 services, including blog, photo sharing, video sharing, groups, forums and others. On Sina Mofun, you can read your friends’ latest activities, or newsfeed, receive instant notice for new comments on your blog posts, photos or videos. It can also be used as an IM tool for real-time chatting with your friends in Sina. Currently only limited widgets for Sina’s services are available on Sina Mofun, and it does not support any open developer platform now. Sina Mofun is just a tool to bundle Sina’s various services and build a walled garden for users, at least so far.

We noticed that on a conference in last week, Charles Cao Chao, CEO of Sina, mentioned that Sina will launched four services in near future, including Sina Space, which has launched in March, Sina Mofun, Sina TV and an open platform. So it seems 2008 will be a year of open platform in China’s Internet, Taobao, Tencent and Sina all said they are considering an open strategy. Then who will be the first one to make it real?