The first thing 27-year-old Cecilia Jiao does when she arrives at work is to check her friends' status updates on Kaixin001.com, a Facebook-style website widely-used by China's young white-collars workers.

"I start my day of work by reading the latest web postings from my friends," said Cecilia, a news editor in Beijing. "I'm used to it, just like many others."

Chinese versions of Facebook and Twitter are increasingly popular in China, where many of the nation's 420 million netizens embrace social media as a trendy way to interact with friends and keep up on the day's news.

"Happy network"

Social networking services (SNS) websites have rapidly grown in China.

Kaixin001.com - which in English translates as "happy network" - has become the leading Chinese SNS after its founding in early 2008.

Kaixin001.com said its it had 90 million users in September, a figure increasing by 100,000 per day.

"SNS is an easy and efficient way for people to manage personal relations," said Jin Jianbin, a journalism professor at Tsinghua University.

Cecilia's Kaixin001.com account has 50 contacts. They are her classmates, colleagues, and friends in real life. But seldom do they meet due to distance and lack of time.

She enjoys reading the updates of friends every day and reciprocates by often posting notes on how she is feeling about about life and work.

"Seeking ways to make my big face smaller," Cecilia wrote in a recent message. Her words received a dozen pieces of replies from friends, which made her, a girl who loves beauty and is hoping to find a boyfriend, feel happy and relieved.

SNS sites have attracted not only ordinary individuals but also celebrities and institutions, and even one influential mainstream media organization.

China Xinhua News Network Corporation (CNC), the recently-launched global television news network of China's official news agency, Xinhua, in June became the first organization to set up an official account on Kaixin001.com. CNC hopes to nurture a loyal fan audience base through a robust online presence.

Microblog's power

Sina's microblog service Weibo, a Chinese-language Twitter clone, is the new superstar in China's booming social media industry. Its 40 million users include some of China's most famous movie stars and other public figures.

Microblogging is often categorized as SNS. But some experts consider it a new-type of media used for disseminating breaking news.

SNS is about "real connections" while microblogs are for information sharing between users, Cheng Binghao, founder and CEO of Kaixin001.com, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"Microbloggers can do live reporting from the scene, which lowers the threshold for taking part in news reporting," Tsinghua University journalism professor Jin Jianbin said.

When a massive landslide hit northwestern China's Zhouqu region in August, a 17-year-old college student was the first to report the disaster to the outside world -- on his microblog.

Wang Kai's initial post was at 3:23 a.m. on Aug. 8, five hours before any traditional media organizations published a report.

"Flood. Blackout. All residents from building huddle around candle," his post said.

Wang continued to post reports with text and pictures, making him the "news center" when many reporters were still trying to make their way to the devastated town.

Notable figures whose microblogs are widely "followed" sometimes use postings to quickly appeal for help when they are in need.

In late August, a violent attack on a popular Chinese science writer, Fang Zhouzi, who is known for exposing academic fraud, caused an online uproar when Fang made it public on his Sina Weibo microblog.

A Sina survey following the incident showed that 92 percent of 39,123 online respondents supported the writer.

"Microblogs enable dense and frequent information-dissemination and a high degree of connectivity among netizens, which surpasses previous forms of internet use," Hu Yong, an associate professor at the journalism and communications school at Peking University, wrote in an opinion article.

"That may explain why microblogs have seen 'explosive' growth in China," Hu said.

E-government tool

New media are an important way to influence and respond to public opinion, for both individuals and corporate citizens, a Shanghai Jiaotong University public opinion research report said in October.

In a related development, Chinese government organs have begun to communicate with the public through new media.

Beijing police officially launched their microblog "Safe Beijing" in August to release information concerning public security and to receive suggestions from the public.

Through the microblog, they "hope to communicate frankly with residents and vulnerable groups," according to Fu Zhenghua, chief of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau.

Furthermore, training for officials of the Communist Party of China at Beijing's municipal party school has also started to include social media skills. Officials are taught how to use microblogs, blogs and instant messaging software.