Mixi starts “Celebrity Account”


Japan’s largest social network Mixi started a specialized user accounts limited for TV-talents/musicians on July 28th 2008.

Mixi has a system limitation on your number of friends “Mai Miku”(My Mixi), 1,000 friends at most, however, with this “official account”, which Mixi ascertains the account is owned by the celebrity herself/himself/themselves (=not fake), that celebrity account can be connected with unlimited number of followers=fans. The account also comes with auto-following-back feature so any fan will be added as a friend with the celebrity with it.

The list of the celebrities has now 12 persons/groups. It is interesting that three of them are American, Japanese-American and Japanese-Indonesian, which foreigners rate is higher than average I think, might be affected that those people already know music promotion have been successful in oversea social networking service, means MySpace.

I think this move is also to chase Cyber Agent/Ameblo’s success (at least on page views) with their celebrities weblog.

Mixi’s Release [J]

via BBWatch


@akky is one of the first pro-bloggers in Japan [J]. He also leads Asiajin, writes for The Japan Times, consults for some foreign companies interested in Japanese web market. (please inquire to akimoto on gmail.com).