Seoul — U.S. online social network MySpace.com has established the most current of its international editions Tuesday, MySpace Korea, in an attempt to enter the market commanded by local players such as SK Communications Co, officials said.
The service, owned by New York-based media conglomerate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., offers exclusive features customized to local users, such as “minilogs,” a sort of online notebook where users can jot down daily feelings with personalized animations and backgrounds….
Like the rest of its 28 other regionally focused portals, MySpace Korea has been customized to appeal to the Korean market with a simplified design, which includes popular music and video content and social-networking profiles.
“A devoted gallery will display the best “skins” – style templates – by Korean designers, allowing users to customize their profiles.”
Although in Korea, MySpace encounters added obstacle: The small Asian nation is a crucial market because it has one of the world’s most advanced web audiences, with near universal broadband distribution and high-speed connections available to nearly one third of the 48m population as well as mobile technology that is enormously ahead of the U.S.
A survey conducted last year by Ipsos Insight establishes South Koreans to be the world’s most regular social network users, with 55% accessing such sites every month, compared with 24% in the US.
Other social-networking sites, like the realistic world Cyworld, already have a lock on the youth market, which is reportedly used by as much as 90% of the country’s under-20s.
“We do not think MySpace will pose a great threat to our service, which is based on strong off-line group ties,” Cyworld spokeswoman Shin Hee-Jung said in a statement.
“There is a positive factor. The Korean service of MySpace is expected to enlarge the domestic market,” she said.
Yet, the latest South Korean service for MySpace asserts it will be successful where others have failed for the reason that it will cater to local culture more than its competition in the social networking space.
“Nevertheless the company may perhaps find it has to conquer the language barrier if it wants to be perceived as competitive.”
MySpace is also seeking to tap the tech-savvy Korean audience by pushing the developer service it launched earlier this year.
“The year of 2008 is the year MySpace stepped towards the open platform – this is why MySpace launched in Korea which is full of IT talent,” said the MySpace chief executive, Chris DeWolfe.
“By a mixture of applications to be developed by Korean IT talent, MySpace completely expects to upgrade our innovation and contribute to Korea’s IT industry.”
MySpace president Chris DeWolfe has arrived in Seoul for a two-day meeting with the local online community, including industry personnel and Internet users.
However, recent statistics from comScore put MySpace at 107m users globally per month, representing one in eight of the world’s web users, and the website has been aggressively expanding its network.
Many US-based organizations have had trouble entering competitive Asian markets, with users often times preferring to use services and technologies developed locally.
Google presently continues a Korean-language site and Chinese-language site, though still has trouble catering to locals. MySpace look forward to learn from the errors of other English services that tried to enter South Korea, and will continue to roll out new features often times designed by Korean users.
“MySpace is now available in 29 nations and in 15 languages.”
The Korean-language version of MySpace follows the launch of a Spanish version for North America’s Latino audience. MySpace has 22 versions tailored for specific countries, on top of the US and UK, and also offers additional versions for French Canadians, and three languages for Switzerland.
In an interesting development in the week, MySpace in addition intends to launch another site in another important tech market: India–which is one of the other hot spots for Google’s social-networking site, Orkut.
“And unlike its Korean counterpart, the beta site for MySpace India appears to be primarily English-language.”