SNS services in Japan
Mixi is Japans most popular SNS service with a claimed market share of close to 80%. When conversation in the media come to SNS, Mixi is also the most mentioned Social Network Service. Mixi had around around 7 million in August 2007 a quite impressive number achieved in less than 3 years. After going public last year the stock value doubled within 12 hours. Mixi turned into the Japanese showcase for 2.0 success. So far the good part. But looking a bit deeper into the service reveals that the glory days of rising users numbers seems to have reached its limit. More and more users move away from Mixi looking for alternatives. The reasons: too much advertisement and too little added value.
Heavy Competition
Competitors like Gree for example offer the possibility to upload and watch videos, other platforms allow users to play games, listen to the playlists of people in their network, locate friends using GPS or even enter into mobile 3D worlds.
Mixi tried to keep-up by introducing video and music functions a few month ago but still Mixi stays what it is: a pure SNS service with some extra services attached to it.
The New Breed
If sheer user number speak for themselves then these two example can show where developments are going:
MobileGameTown (MoBaGe) by DeNA combines casual mobile games and SNS services. Just within less than 6 month registrations surpassed 6.5 million and they are still growing. And different from Mixi (which is web and mobile based) MoBaGe is only available on the mobile phone
“Maho no Island” is a mobile novel platform which allows users to write their own novels on the mobile phone and submit it to the site. The site offers thousands of novels written by users. They even published a book featuring some of the novels and it sold over millions of copies and made it into the best seller charts in Japan. Maho no Island also offers SNS functionalities to its 5.5 million mobile users.
Beyond SNS
All of these services did not start as a SNS service but they offered a unique value on its own with SNS as an added value to its users. And this is where the trend goes.
For example LISMO, KDDI AU’s mobile music service started to offer a function called “Utatomo” in 2006 for finding people with similar interests based on a users individual play list and their general interests helping the company to increase their overall music sales by 15%.
Conclusion
The time of SNS only services will soon be over. (Expect for maybe specific B2B or special interest SNS offers). In the future a SNS service will not be able to survive simply by providing a social networking functionality as a core service. Instead SNS functions will become part of other services helping to drive personalization (through the data gathered), drive loyalty and in the end to drive sales.
