A few months ago, Jadie Oh did a presentation of her Cyworld page for the freeFormed crew. I had heard of Cyworld before, and had read about it its alarming popularity in Korea. However, since the whole site is in Korean, I had never really been able to ascertain exactly what they were doing or how people were using the site. Jadie showed us her personal Cyworld, describing the various components of one's profile and the clubs she belonged to etc. It looked, at first, like an ingenious idea. She had her own miniroom, which could be decorated with 'furniture' bought from Cyworld's online store using the site's currency 'acorns'. Apparently, in Korea, the purchases are automatically changed to your mobile phone bill, as SK Telecom, one of Korea's largest telecommunication companies own Cyworld. In your profile you could also upload pictures, write journal entries, display comments from friends, make sketches, have photo albums and decorate your very own minime. On the technology side, the profiles are designed in Flash so that it is relatively easy to place and drag purchased items for your miniroom to their desired locations. At the time when were all reviewing the site, Jadie told us that it would eventually be coming to the US. I had no idea it would happen this quickly, but apparently Cyworld is now here!
The question is, will it be as successful here as it was in Korea, especially given the widespread popularity of myspace. As the artcile points out, Cyworld is one of the oldest social networking sites in the world, and arguably one of the most successful. But does it have something new and exciting to contribute to the already over-saturated social networking market that will attract a substantial user base? Well, for one thing, the design of Cyworld is certainly much easier on the eyes. Each profile and miniroom looks structurally the same and while users can modify their rooms and profile in many ways, none of their changes interupt the overall basic appearance of site itself. This means that the site has a kind of uniformity that makes it much easier to look at then the incredibly poorly designed and chaotic profiles that occupy most of myspace. Cyworld also appears to offer the user more options of things to do. You have to pay for certain things, as aforementioned, which may not sit well with the current social networking user base, which is used to 'free codes and layouts'. But there seem to be more reasons built into the site that would encourage a user to return, beyond simply viewing comments and messages. Cyworld also heavily relies on the idea of 'clubs', which can be created by any user and seem to involve people talking back and forth about different subjects using comments and media.
I recently signed up to try it out and I was surprised by quite a few things. First of all, when I had originally viewed the site in Korean and watched Jadie navigate around, I had thought that the user interface was pretty well designed. Unfortunately, when I signed up for the US version and was actually able to read what was going on I became very confused quite quickly. The site is still in beta version, but I found it very difficult to find the simplest things, like how to upload a photo for my image icon. Not that I didn't eventually get it, but it took a while. I also still have yet to find anywhere that tells you how much an 'acorn' is actually worth in dollars. I have to admit that I didn't navigate around to other parts of the site, althought it seems that people have already created various different clubs. Is it possible that this could be the next big thing? I'm not sure. I definitely think that the site provides a lot of different options for communication and lots of potential to be more then simply a place to send silly messages to friends, but I'm not sure how its simplified (and somewhat childish) looking design is going to be received. I think that if the instructions on usage are a little bit clearer and enough intial users sign on and invite their friends, it has the possibility to reach a very large auidence. The question is, does it have the ability to be more then simply another irrelevant waste of time?