The China-based online retailer Alibaba, often referred to as “China's Ebay,” has taken a $586 million stake in what has been called “China's Twitter (News - Alert),” the Sina Corporation’s Weibo, indicating big plans for Alibaba to forge into social media.

The deal values Weibo at about $3.3 billion, which is equal to Sina’s entire market value as of Friday. Alibaba has been valued by analysts at more than $55 billion.

Weibo is China's most popular microblogging service. With its now 18 percent stake in the company, Alibaba can access Weibo's user base, which includes tens of millions of active users. The giant Internet retailer has the right to raise its stake to 30 percent in the future.

The agreement is a clear investment for Weibo as well, with the Sina Corporation stating that it expects to receive $380 million in advertising and social commerce revenue over the next three years.

In their negotiations, Alibaba and Sina have agreed to work together to pair social networking with e-commerce – a potentially groundbreaking partnership for China considering that Sina Weibo had more than 46 million daily users in 2012 – an increase of 82 percent from 2011.

Though the closest thing to Twitter China has, Weibo is still a long way off from having as great a following and impact as Twitter, which makes sense, considering the Republic of China, a communist nation, is keen on staying insular, whereas Twitter has global aspirations.

Moreover, according to a recent study, about 57 percent of the nearly 30,000 Sina Weibo accounts  sampled had no measurable activity or posts. 

"We believe that the cooperation of our two robust platforms will bring unique and valuable services to Weibo users, as well as making the mobile Internet a core part of Alibaba's strategy." said Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba.

It looks like more changes are on the horizon for Alibaba, which is expected to pursue an initial public offering in the coming year or two. It has been announced that Ma will soon step down as chairman.