A few weeks ago, on a weekend morning, I was abruptly awaken by a phone mail. It was some sort of invite to a community service, namely hi5.com.
I turn on the PC and I see all my email accounts having received the same invite, apparently started from a friend of mine. I then proceed to accept the invite and I join only to find out that my friend’s account isn’t there anymore.
I continue browsing around, it’s fun, there are so many people. Click on one picture and see the person (cute) friends. Apparently also my friend has thousands of friends already ! (even thought he only existed for a minute or so !)
Eventually I get to talk to my friend personally: he tells me that the invite was an accident. Somehow hi5.com managed send one to invite to every email in his Hotmail’s account ! He told me that he thought he was going to select some friends form his contacts but hi5.com instead simply send invites to everyone. Ence his unsubscription.
It’s not impossible that there may have been some sort of warning at some point, which her may have oversaw. But it definitely wasn’t clearly visible (my friend has a good sight 8). I don’t think that a service should allow for such an operation to take place anyway. Who in the right of his/her mind would want to invite every single contact to anywhere ?!

Browsing around hi5.com was interesting. I’m very curious, I’m one of those that likes to read personals, that likes to see people commercializing themselves.. but definitely from a distance. Hi5.com seems rather overcrowded.. and where there is a crowd, there are some horny men trying to become “friends” (ah ah !) to some vanity chicks. Cute chicks, which are volatile by nature, on the net can grow into some super-pumped-up queen bees. They can get a billion compliments from any number of seeking individuals (bees). The men think that they have nothing to lose and they proceed in trying to become “friends” to anything that they like and some more. It’s like a kid in a toy store. The kid will try ask for anything in sight ! Compliments are free and one may get lucky.. you never know !

Well, it may not be all that bad.. but, generally, I think that hi5.com has put itself in a bad place for the long term.

Next is orkut.com. I’ve been invited there by a friend, I joined and the first thing I didn’t like was.. the looks ! A community container has to feel like home, but Orkut’s spartan and bluish looks really doesn’t feel comfortable.
Orkut quickly placed me on a search for friends within my area (Japan). There’s really a lot of them from Japan, but, strangely, they all seem to speak Portuguese ! ..Japanese, from Brazil ! There were even some pregnant women. One had her huge naked belly fully visible…. what is this ?!
A community site’s goal is also to link people into communities. So, today I tried again, this time looking for communities instead of people. I tried some “3D graphics” or “game programming”. I found 3-4 communities. They didn’t seem very active, but, again, lots of comments in Portuguese !!!
It felt like living in some sort of globalized place where quantity of people finally impose dominant languages over English.

English or Portuguese, I don’t really care. I live in Japan because I like the country. I was interested in Japan since I was a child and so I’d much rather get into some sort of community portal where I can learn about living Japan and Japanese language.
Enter mixi.jp, possibly, currently the fastest growing site in Japan. I saw people from work using it. A friend tells me that he hears people talking about it in the streets.
You can get there only with an invitation and, luckily, there is no option to invite 100 email addresses at once.
It’s all in Japanese and it looks a lot more cozy than Orkut. The layout has fixed width, which is better suited for a site where a page may have little content (e.g. a personal profile). The choice of colors is also better, with a warm tone. There is a profile portion, a diary and a home page with links to recent updates of friends or communities to which one is related. No fancy HTML editing for the diary, but pictures can be easily attached. The first 100MB are free, after that one can pay for more..
The fact that the service is aimed at the Japanese public is already a big step forward. I don’t mean to sound racist (I’m not Japanese myself, after all !), but not everything was meant to be mixed together. I speak English a lot better than I even understand Japanese, but at the same time, I have more in common with Japanese than white Americans from the USA, for example. (back to the: “I live in Japan, therefore that’s where my main interest is”).

To conclude, I must admit that I don’t necessarily feel fit to be part of some sort of community portal. It somewhat subtracts from my individuality and places me at the same level of many other people that I don’t know. I prefer to express myself here, on kazzuya.com.. my site, my place ! However, the community thing experience is interesting, as it somewhat puts me in touch with people with whom I can potentially physically relate. While forcing me to read and write Japanese.
One interesting feature of mixi is that one can see a log of people that have visited his/her own personal page with time and date. This is useful to indirectly start some sort of connection. It’s a bit like being noticed as you look at someone in the street.
For example, the other day I went to a trance music event at a club. Back home I browsed around mixi looking for people that mentioned that event. I read what some had to say, without commenting. The next day, some of those people saw me visiting, came to my page, saw my diary entry about having gone to the event, and posted comments (something like: “I couldn’t go, how was it ?”).

Both Mixi and Orkut have their Web 2.0ish fashionable beta specifier next to their title. Not sure if they mean their service is in beta stage or if the whole Internet community concept is beta..
The Internet has great potential to extend into anything, there is still an infinite number of potential killer apps.. and sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to a single feature or the color of the background !

woo !

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized