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You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one.

I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the microblogging that takes place in China, and the smartphones and all the people that want to take pictures of myself and my family.

From the streets of Cairo and the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, from the busy political calendar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, social media was not only sharing the news but driving it.

Twitter didn't make up the hashtag. Twitter didn't make up the retweet. It's our users. And people started using them so much that we decided to weave them into the product. I can't think of another company that has taken its users' actions and said, 'We're going to make them useful to everybody.'

Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but is used heavily by the rest of the Chinese-speaking world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Almost every week, there are stories in the press or on Chinese social media about what even the official Chinese media call 'hot online topics:' stories about how people in a particular village or town used Weibo to expose malfeasance by local or regional authorities.

In 2007 I was at Facebook, and we looked at some of the social networks in Asia, and they were full of games.

Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now.

You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.

In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt - something that also happened in Xinjiang - I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.