Local services challenge Facebook, Twitter

Garnering the most attention among the Korean Internet companies is SK Communications, which hauled more than 25 million customers for Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) since starting the social networking service in 1999, but is now concerned over the quieting fanfare.

By Kim Tong-hyung

Geography had mattered in the online realm of Korea, where Naver (www.naver.com) and other local services dominated the likes of Google and Yahoo! with relative ease.

However, this appears to be changing with the explosion of social networking services, fueled by the ever-increasing consumer and business appetite to use smartphones, which has Korean Internet users swept under the global epidemics that are Facebook and Twitter.

And there is a great sense of urgency among Korean Internet companies, which have recently been hitting their foreign rivals with a wave of me-too products to avoid getting too far behind in their own backyard. It bears further watching, however, whether Koreans will have enough room to differentiate, as social networking seems less about consuming the service itself than the people who use it.

Garnering the most attention among the Korean Internet companies is SK Communications, which hauled more than 25 million customers for Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) since starting the social networking service in 1999, but is now concerned over the quieting fanfare.

Company officials have frequently claimed credit for creating the business model that blossomed with Facebook and MySpace, but this makes it all the much more difficult for them to accept that Cyworld isn’t generating half the excitement among Korean users than Facebook is now.

SK Communications is getting more serious about fighting complacency and its most visible attempt has been C-Log, a Facebook-resembling service that the company launched in September and hopes will give the Cyworld platform a needed jolt.

Unlike the old Cyworld ``mini-homepages,’’ tailored for users looking to maintain a closed and controlled network of immediate friends, C-Log aims to attract users looking to expand their social circle and are open about sharing information with people they don’t know.

Although it’s hard to say that C-Log provides any essential features that allows it to differentiate itself meaningfully from Facebook, SK Communications hopes that the vast customer pool of Cyworld will prove to be a distinctive edge. C-Log will also allow users to show posts chronologically, similar to Twitter’s ``Timeline,’’ and express their response to comments, links, videos and other content posted by users, much like Facebook’s ``Like’’ button.

``Through C-Log, we have tried to combine the openness and expansiveness of Facebook and Twitter with the strong and secure privacy functions we have been providing with Cyworld,’’ said a company official.

``C-Log users can expand their number of friends quickly through linking themselves as `ilchons,’ or close friends, or leaving comments, and they can also prevent themselves from being listed as ilchons by those who they dislike.’’

SK Communications will not only be competing against Facebook, but also NHN, the operator of Internet search kingpin, Naver (www.naver.com). NHN has been pushing an enormous marketing campaign for Me2Day (me2day.net), a Twitter-like service that has existed since 2007, as it looks to leverage its search dominance to the social networking arena.

The onslaught of television, print and online advertisements appear to be working as NHN recently said that the number of Me2Day users reached 3 million recently, after hitting the 1 million mark in March and the 2 million mark in September.

Me2Day enables users to broadcast their instant status in text posts up to 150 characters, and NHN is exploring a variety of changes to the service, including allowing users to access games, multimedia and other content created by developers. The changes would mean that Me2Day will become more like Facebook and less like Twitter as it moves forward, NHN officials said.

``I think the strength of Twitter is that it allows users to receive the `tweets’ of globally famous people, like Barak Obama for instance, and `retweet’ to them, and this is something we can’t possibly compete with now,’’ said an official from NHN’s Internet strategy division team.

``Me2Day aims at creating a more closely knitted network of cyber friends bonded by interests or real-life connections. Essentially, Me2Day is closer to Facebook than it is to Twitter and Cyworld than it is to Facebook. For a social networking service, there is little room to differentiate in terms of functions to what is already out there and the competition comes down to the number of interesting people around you that is subscribed to it, so the marketing muscle definitely has to be there.’’

Daum (www.daum.net), the country’s second most popular website behind Naver, which recently unveiled ``Social Web,’’ a specialized search service for postings on social networking services Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Me2Day. Daum also pushes its own social media services, such as ``Place’’ and ``Yozm,’’ that are tailored for smartphone users.

According to Internet market researcher, Metrix, the number of visitors to Facebook and Twitter in Korea reached 7.38 million and 8.65 million, respectively, during the month of September. This represented a 650 percent year-on-year increase for Facebook and a 580 percent jump for Twitter, said the Metrix report.

Cyworld saw its number of visitors increase by nearly 12 percent over the same period, but its page view totals dropped by around 22 percent. Me2Day experienced a 94 percent increase in visitors, but a 38 percent decline in page views. Metrix believes that the inconsistency between the number of visitors and page views could be explained by an increasing number of Internet users accessing the services through smartphones and other data-enabled handsets.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr