Cyworld

03May07

Cyworld is Korea’s leading social networking website. While many English social networking sites are struggling with how to make revenue, Cyworld is churning $300,000 a day.

Cyworld is focused. The site is targetted at teens and 20-somethings – people who have time to create networks, homepages and 3-D virtual rooms. Users can buy virtual items to decorate their 3-D rooms. A staggering 25% of the Korean population have an account with Cyworld. Cyworld is now in Japan, China, Taiwan and USA.

In web 1.0, we had Geocities. That was the site to create your personal homepage. You could even create/join neighbourhoods (e.g. Silicon Valley). In 1997, it was the 5th most popular site on the internet.

Geocities rise to fame ended abruptly when the dot com bubble burst and Yahoo! bought over Geocities. Many users abandoned the site and the premium features didn’t gain any traction.

Cyworld is everything that Geocities couldn’t become.

Neat Stuff

• Create your own 3-D room in pixel art
• Create a pixel art avatar of yourself
• Fill your 3-D room with virtual items
• Slick and cute interface
• Photos, videos, journal, sketchbook, file storage, etc. all integrated
• Add friends as “neighbours”

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