State of the Web in Japan

The dominance of mobile media and technology in Japan has created a slight disconnect between Web 2.0 activities here and in the U.S. As advanced as Japan's techology culture may be, the Japanese have traditionally relied less on computers for their internet activities and much more on their mobile phones – yup, even for all their daily email, news, blogging, shopping, and research. That said, there are still a few interesting developments in the Web 2.0 arena here in Japan, some of which are covered by two sites – PingMag and Read/Write Web, so I will briefly summarize them and integrate a few words of my own. First, some background on these sites: PingMap is a web-centric blog / magazine produced by web design firm IMG SRC, Inc. The Web 2.0 article was written by an acquaintance there, so you may notice a plug or two for their sites :) Read/WriteWeb is written by independent webtech consultant and analyst Richard MacManus. There are also a number of other good articles by on his blog so be sure to check them out.

On to my analysis!

PingMag
PingMag does a good job finding and comparing Japanese Web 2.0 services to their U.S. counterparts. For social networking, the U.S. has MySpace while Japan has Mixi. I should add that since the article was posted, Mixi has IPO'd in Japan to a tune of $1.9 billion. And remarkably, as I mentioned before, there hasn't been much coverage overseas. For the second-fiddle Facebook, in Japan we have Gree.

The video-sharing space has been interesting to watch as it is perhaps the first time a U.S. service has become dominant in Japan. Typically the language barrier has been a stop-gap for many businesses trying to enter this country, but YouTube's ease of use and multi-lingual support (in the comments, for example) has been a boon for its popularity here and an example of how one might succeed without investing time and resources into localizing the interface. As long as the need is great – and for YouTube in Japan's case, it was very much so – the Japanese and their rather hilarious mastery <http://www.engrish.com/> of English can overcome any obstacles. We likely will not be seeing a viable competitor sprout from Japan for legal and political reasons, so expect YouTube to gain exposure here as we move forward.

I'm personally not all that familiar with podcasting services, but for the Odeo and Podcast Alley users out there, Japan's very own ZapZap may be of interest – especially since it's one of the few Web 2.0 services aspiring to appeal to both the English and the Japanese community. If nothing else, at least the design seems to indicate an appreciation for "web 2.0-yness" :P

37signals' Ta-da Lists is mentioned as a productivity-enhancing web platform, and from Japan the article mentions Orchestrate – which is a fun implementation, but the author isn't exactly sharing objectively (Orchestrate is his personal project). There is however a fascinating project in beta form (what isn't?!) called CheckPad. You can tell CheckPad is clearly targeting the Japanese market with their focused integration of mobile devices.

The U.S. / Japan web 2.0 services comparison gets interesting as we enter the blog-buzz aggregation arena – from the U.S. we have Technorati, and from Japan, Kizasi. Kizasi is less encumbered by senseless adds and provides a clear, focused representation of its purpose – to show what's hot in the blogosphere, now. Technorati does a better job of promoting the blogs, while Kizasi is more focused on the subject matter across them.

Lastly, there's a dearth of comparable news aggregation sites provided by the Japan web-centric community. While the U.S. has Digg and TechCrunch, TechCrunchHQ apparently caught a waft of opportunity and has opened their own service here – TechCrunch Japan. Japan Entry is a big challenge for most industries, and usually requires partnering with a Japanese firm in order to build reputation and respect with the client base. But the web-space may prove to be different as it's a younger domain and new services are more quickly experimented with and adopted by a younger demographic.

The PingMag article never mentions Web 2.0 poster-child photo-sharing site Flickr, but team Japan has its own contribution to this space with Zorg, which aspires to be more for the professional demographic (although I think Flickr appeals to them quite well already). Zorg is still relatively new and actively hiring!

Read/Write Web
Read/Write Web has a more recent article in the style of an interview with Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners). There are some good statistics throughout on some of the services mentioned also in the PingMap post, and a good discussion to give readers a sense of the unique challenges web 2.0 projects face in growing in Japan. Overall Yahoo's dominance is felt very strongly here as culturally the Japanese are wary to try new things, but Masashi notes that recently Yahoo is struggling as engineers move to develop newer and more entrepreneurial services such as social bookmarking site Hatena and SNS Gree.

There's a good discussion towards the end on the maturing of Japan's web-space, its strong online advertising market, its hot IPO market, and the reasons behind the dominance of mobile platforms.

About the Author

Matthew is a music and technology enthusiast who aspires to raise the awareness on the benefits of internet technologies and services in mobile-dominant Japan.