微博的APIs

“One well-established name that ByteDance did accept investment from was Weibo, which joined during the Series C round. Weibo had beaten Yiming’s former employer Fanfou to win the crown title of “Twitter for China.” That meant they could offer ByteDance a vast amount of data. Weibo opened up its APIs 64 —the intermediaries that allow different apps to interact—allowing Toutiao to access Weibo’s user data and activity, such as comments.
If a user logged into Toutiao with their Sina Weibo account, ByteDance would analyze their Weibo interests and reading preferences within seconds and use that insight to personalize the recommendations. It wasn’t until later that Weibo came to realize ByteDance was a competitor. It eventually shut down the rival’s access to its data and sold its shares in ByteDance.
You might ask how could one of the biggest names of the Chinese internet, Weibo, have failed to realize that ByteDance was its competitor? The answer was much for the same reasons that none of the best minds in venture capital took them seriously.
Toutiao was defined as a news aggregator; thus, it was narrowly perceived as merely competing within the class of mobile news apps, a somewhat uninteresting and over-saturated category as far as most of the tech giants and investors were concerned.”