Asoboo: A New Multilingual SNS from Japan
It looks like Mixi’s popularity and IPO success has budding entrepreneurs going head-over-heels trying to snap up any remaining market. An invitation to Asoboo (which means “let’s play” in Japanese) just passed my inbox so I created an account and gave it a quick run. There’s a clear web2.0-y flavor to it, which is not so terrible except that it’s starting to get a little old. Luckily for the asaboo team much of their core base will initially be from Japan, where the concepts of web 2.0 are still in their nascent stages, as I discussed in an earlier post. Unfortunately, while the development team seems to be keeping an eye on the Valley, if they stick to some of their decisions asoboo will simply be an also-ran and here’s why.
The registration process is pretty straight forward, nicely taking into consideration the international community by, for example, distinguishing between current country of residence and where one is originally from (if different). But then again, my guess is that the target audience for this service would consider more than one country to be “home”, and there’s no clear option to note that (except for in an open “profile” text box perhaps).
Which brings me to the mindset that will doom asoboo. Directly under this open profile box is a disclaimer warning users that they are, ultimately, not in control of their profile. What better method to scare away potential fans than to say certain types of personal contributions will be removed? Any sufficiently built SNS framework will filter out unwanted profiles by virtue of the social interactions that are created as the network grows. A big benefit of all this interconnectivity is the ability to let the users decide lest the development team gets caught in a never-ending game of cleanup. Let the users decide what an undesireable personality or profile is. After all, if asaboo gets going successfully and brings in a large user-base, does the development team really feel they can police all the accounts?
Remember Friendster’s policing of profile images? It’s no wonder they’re slowly receding in the rear-view-mirror. At least MySpace and Mixi don’t make you feel like you’re answering to anyone. Aside from creating accounts and obtaining personal information, there’s virtually no barrier to entry for webservices – so any hint of policing before even getting started will just push users on to another service that doesn’t come with that “watchful eye”. If asaboo wants to be a true competitor to the SNS services already out there, it will have to change this policing image.
Technorati Tags: japan, web2.0
October 12th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
(disclaimer: I’m one of the developers of Asoboo)
First up, thanks for checking us out and taking some time to write this up. Regarding the sign-up, you make a good point about “where is home?”, but in our experience finding a decent way to share the location of places you like to hang out has been more difficult (a bit of background: in Asoboo you can share info about good bars or cafes and so on with other users). For example, what works well for Tokyo doesnt really work well for smaller cities like Canberra, Australia.
As for the ‘no dating’ stuff… before the relaunch this year, Asoboo had a bit of a history of being “a bit of a sleazy pick-up spot” (quote from http://jeansnow.net/2006/10/10/asoboo/) and one of the goals for this year has been to shed this image (whether we have been successful or not is another story!) We have been trying to encourage users to be more positive with their profiles, and it seems to be working reasonably well. We should probably soften the tone of that text though :)