[LINK] "TGIF v the Naverland gingerbread house"

[rfmcdonald]

The Economist's Babbage blog explores the social networking scene in South Korea. I'd earlier mentioned South Korea as one of the few holdouts against invincible Facebook. That may be changing.

NAVER, a search engine with email and blog services, has more traffic in South Korea than any other site. It’s only one of several home-grown web services here with loyal audiences. But Twitter is now growing faster in South Korea than almost anywhere else in the world, and Facebook users have doubled since April of this year. In an effort to stem the tide, Naver has launched a prime-time ad campaign with the slogan “Go Social”. And it has, sort of. The company designed its new social networking tools to keep users entirely within its own suite of products, gathered together in a place Koreans call “Naverland”. And while Facebook recently announced globally that it would allow users to export all of their personal data, Naver is betting that it won’t have to make the same concession in South Korea. It is forcing Koreans to make a binary choice: Naver or not.

[. . .]

Naver has launched a Twitter-like service called “me2DAY”, a Facebook-like service called “NAVER Me”, and “NAVER Talk”, a text- and instant-messaging service. But Naver, as one Korean blogger puts it, runs a gingerbread house. Unlike Google, Naver almost never collaborates with smaller companies on new services, but builds everything itself. It is difficult to move personal data in or out of Naver. And it tacks new services onto a bright, cluttered homepage. The gingerbread house is full of treats. Why would anyone need to leave?

"That’s not what 'Social’ is," read the most popular article this week on Bloter, a tech site. The article describes a "lock-in effect". When several different social networking services share data as a block – as with Naver’s Go Social tools or TGIF – users tend to avoid the moving cost of transferring data between blocks. That is, a smart-phone owner who tweets is more likely to choose Facebook as a social network; once on Facebook, the user is even less likely to adopt any of Naver’s interlinked services. Bloter argues that the lock-in effect is breaking in favor of foreign services: Twitter, Google, the iPhone and Facebook. This will be hard to overcome, even with Naver’s celebrity marketing.