Midterms are almost here... The blogs should start rolling in...

No Comment Labels: blogging, contemplative, finals, internet, korean culture, ranting

Well I was looking back through my blogs and I noticed that around midterms and finals there was a spike in my blogging.. Hmmm.. Why stop now right?

I want to address a recent article in chosun.com, a korean newspaper discussing the recent difficulties that web giants such as Yahoo, Google and Myspace are having penetrating the Korean market. The article opens...

Is South Korea a graveyard for overseas Internet companies? American Internet heavies such as Google, YouTube and MySpace, leaders of the so-called "web 2.0" frenzy, face heavy odds in South Korea. Why is it that these companies boast astronomical numbers of subscribers and users in many other markets around the world but find little luck here?

The article goes on to mention Korean web giants Naver.com (by far Korea's top search engine) and Cyworld (by far Korea's top social networking sight). I've tried to use cyworld in the past, as a matter of fact cyworld did a US launch and as far as I can tell aren't having the success they hoped for. For me cyworld was a little bit too involved. Let me explain: You have to build a character, decorate your room, hang posters, buy clothes, add a tv, update your furnature... All sorts of "nonsense" that mimic daily life. I don't know about you, but when I log onto facebook it's to get away from daily life. Next, I use google.com as my primary search engine. Why? Because it's no frills search. I love more the fact that the google search bar is built into my browser because then I don't have to look at anything. I can just type my search terms in the little box and BOOM there are my results. Today, for the first time, I decided to use Naver.com. And instantly, I can tell you why these web giants are struggling. The chosun.com article states that...

Experts say the foreign challengers have failed to understand the peculiarities of the South Korean market. Their quality suffers in comparison to local offerings in terms of Korean-language features, site design and sophistication of services, South Korean experts argue.

After using Naver.com for just 2 search terms, I immediately began to wonder if anyone from Google ever did research on Korea before launching google.kr? Let me use a couple of photo examples.

I did a search on naver.com for a movie I was looking for. First challenge is I didn't know the movie title in Korean, I only knew the english version: Happiness. Second challenge is I had my default keyboard setting set to Korean.. so instead of Happiness, it comes out: ㅗ메ㅔㅑㅜㄷㄴㄴ. This is a common problem with people who have to type in two or more languages as many Korean people do. Below are screen shots from the three search results. You'll notice Google didn't give me the option to convert the korean into english and do the search based the mistyped version. To Google's credit they did list pictures and news on the site.. but not so helpful. Next Yahoo looks much closer to Naver (which might be why korean people are a bit more receptive to it?) Finally there's Naver, now you can't tell from these pictures, but Yahoo and Naver go on to list other categories in which the word happiness can be found. (ie, pictures, movies, music, posters, tv shows, websites, blogs.. all broken down by category. ). Korean people are an organic people, they love their dramas they buy the newest coolest thing, they flood cafe's to talk with friends until all hours of the night. Any foreign company that comes in is going to have to understand this and make everything organic.

On to myspace. While I would probably argue that the success of cyworld.com is as much due to the "harsh coaxing" of the parent company (SK Communications) for all of their employees to create and keep a personal cyworld page, it is also because Cyworld is reflection of daily life. This daily life is built within the construct of a communal society. This is unlike myspace which is a reflection of daily life built within the construct of an individualistic society...

Anyways, what do I know? I'm just a law student in korea, trying to learn the language, the culture, the legal education system. Good luck to the American companies.. I feel they're going to need it.

Google.kr