By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The micro-blogging craze created by Twitter (www.twitter.com) is finally hitting South Korean shores, and local Internet companies are benefiting from it.
Twitter, which allows subscribers to broadcast their real-time status to whoever is interested on computers and mobile devices, is starting to create a real buzz here.
Teenage figure skating sensation Kim Yu-na, who might be the country's most beloved public figure, has nearly 30,000 followers for her ``tweets'' and even President Lee Myung-bak, who will perhaps never be associated with Internet savvy, endorsed Twitter in his recent visit to the United States.
The growing interest in Twitter is proving to be a gain for NHN, the Internet industry kingpin that operates Naver (www.naver.com), the country's most popular Web site that controls more than 70 percent of search traffic here.
NHN got involved in micro-blogging when it acquired me2DAY (me2day.net) late last year. The company had been struggling to generate excitement for me2DAY, but the Twitter buzz seems to have provided a shot in the arm.
When NHN bought me2DAY, the number of subscribers was around 28,000. Now, NHN is happy to report more than 72,000 me2DAY users for July, benefiting from a growth spurt over the past four to five months.
According to Korean Click (www.koreanclick.com), an Internet marketing research company, the number of daily unique visitors to me2DAY peaked at around 125,000 in July. Twitter, in comparison, averaged about 60,000 Korean visitors per day.
However, despite NHN's marketing efforts, Twitter is clearly the most popular micro-blogging service here. Rankey.com (www.rankey.com), another research company, said the number of monthly visitors to Twitter was counted at 580,000 in June, a drastic jump from the 14,000 in January. Me2Day, on the other hand, attracted around 120,000 visitors in January.
Simplicity is certainly one of the biggest strengths of Twitter, which makes it an effective tool for subscribers to communicate with an indefinite number of Internet users, and thus, change the way people get information.
To differentiate, me2DAY puts more emphasis on community functions, adapting to Korean users who have grown accustomed to close-knit social networking services such as Cyworld (www.cyworld.com).
NHN is planning to add members-only community services to me2DAY starting next month, which will allow users to keep smaller company on the issues they choose.
The company also rearranged the menu bar of the me2DAY personal pages to allow easier reading of the posts, and added a ``subscription'' function, which enables users to receive the posts of others without linking them as ``friends,'' which are me2DAY's equivalent of ``followers.''
NHN also stresses that me2DAY works better on mobile phones, while Korean Twitter users are frustrated by the inability to communicate through handsets, as Twitter has yet to explore partnerships with Korean mobile carriers.
``Unlike Twitter, me2DAY users can post updates through text messaging on mobile phones. The fact that me2DAY is ideally designed for the country's wireless environment is one of our biggest strengths in competing against Twitter,'' said an NHN executive.