Asiajin

Following to one of the Big 3 social networking service Mixi’s clone Mixi Voice, which made Evan Williams “unpleasant”, another successful, probably now most vital among three, social networking Gree enters into microblog service (registration required for all Gree pages besides the top login page).

As once defeated a battle against Mixi on PC web, Gree shifted into mobile web with casual games and avatar, supported by the 2nd biggest cellphone carrier KDDI au. Currently Gree PC site only gets 1% of all users. Honestly speaking, no one are using the PC site.

current PC top page of Gree

That is why Gree CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka told “It is totally built from scratch. Please forget the current PC Gree site ever existed” with confidence at press conference [J].

The new top page, currently accessible in parallel with the old one, looks much simpler, reminding me both Twitter and Facebook.

Tanaka said the PC Gree will be real-time social service around the Hitokoto (one-phrase) feature, which allows user to exchange what they are doing in 140 letters. It also supports emoji so you may use emoji both on mobile and PC sites. Twitter Japan recently launched Japanese mobile site with Emoji support, but Twitter PC site (which is the same as worldwide version) cannot show/input Emoji.

Besides the Twitter-like feature, Gree ported and porting their successful elements from its mobile version. “Avatars” are shared between the original mobile and PC sites.

“News” and social comments are very similar Mixi provides. “Celebrities Blogs” seems to follow successful CyberAgent’s Ameblo blog.

The current Beta only supports Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Google Chrome. On the official release in November, they will support Internet Explorer. They will also provide “Twitter Sync” feature. Casual games will be put to PC version, too.

A dedicated iPhone site is also planned in future, on which user can register to and play on Gree, which is a good news for iPhone users who cannot register any of big 3 social networking at this point.

See Also:

Gree report on French TV [Fr]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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Mainland China’s 2nd largest social game maker Rekoo[C] launched a flash-based social game on Japan’s largest social network service Mixi[J], which earned more than two million users in less than two months since the launch, and it’s ranked the 1st in the number of Mixi app users.

The game is called Sunshine Ranch (click here for its Japanese edition requiring log-in to Mixi, or here for its Chinese edition requiring log-in to 51.com), and it allows you to grow crops and livestock virtually in a ranch, and you can share the state of your field of vegetables and flowers with your friends online.   Some users are truly addicted to enjoy it, and it seems they can’t help thinking about the game even during business hours.   The key factor to attract the users successfully is several “social” functions on the game.   If you invite someone to the game, you’ll get a reward item.   You can water and reap crops your friends have grown, and also add and remove harmful insects on their fields.

You need to wait several hours to harvest crops after sewing seeds, and the time left until harvest will be appeared accompanied with every crop you’re growing.  If you missed the chance to reap the field, your friends might have taken them away.

Sunshine Ranch on 51.com (Chinese Edition)

Sunshine Ranch on Mixi (Japanese Edition)

Meanwhile, another China-made social game called Everyone’s Farm (click here for its Japanese edition requiring log-in to Mixi, or here for its Chinese edition requiring log-in to renren.com) is also ranked so high, which is currently the third and has engaged 500,000 users.   This is a service of Rakoo[J] (not Rekoo of Sunshine Farm), a flash-based social game portal operated by Mainland China’s largest search portal for cellphone handsets Yicha[C].

Kaixin Farm on Renren.com (Chinese Edition)

Everyone’s Farm on Mixi (Japanese Edition)

In this last months, Japanese social network service users are so busy to cultivate the fields prepared by Chinese game developers.

Oct. 27th Update:

Sunshine Ranch is being accused of the following points by the users:

1. The game used to be absolutely free, but last week it started providing the users an option to buy virtual fertilizers by paying “REAL” cash with their credit cards.
2. The game uses the credit card processor who is known for being usually adopted by erotic sites.
3. For transferring the credit card number entered by the user to the processor from the game app, they seemed to embed it on a user session that could be seen on a browser’s URL window and it could be vulnerable against tapping his/her credit card number. (this vulnerability is already fixed)

Tags: China, Community, Company, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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You might have heard about that Gmail and iPhone has added Japan originated emoticon, Emoji, set. You may know that Google has been promoting those “letters” into Unicode standard.

Filing those drawings as new letters is, though Chinese letters were made from drawings thousands years ago, not acceptable for all people, some says it is useless in other areas, culturally biased, too childish, violation against Unicode compatibility policy, etc.

But it is true that those Emoji-s are widely used on Japanese cellphones already, and Japanese population and market are not ignorable for those world-class internet companies including Google, Apple and others, it is understandable Google and companies need a standard way of handling those Emoji-s.

3 major Japanese cellphone carriers leaves incompatibility of those Emoji-s deliberately for their customer retention, which Google and others also try to solve by this standardization. This is so good for Japanese web developers because converting Emoji-s among carriers is one of the most hated tasks they have to do here.

Google successfully got agreement at Unicode Consortium after a great struggle, and now they are proceeding to the next level, ISO Working Group (WG2).

On the WG2, Ireland and Germany national bodies suggested an alternative, to make it more universal. They proposed more “universal” emoticons set. (citations to the original set)

On it, they also modified Emoji-s’ glyphs to what they thought more common. However, Japanese researchers think that some of emoticons’ expressions came from Japanese manga expressions, from which most Japanese can easily understand what emotions they conveys, but hard to guess if you are not familiar manga.

If you are interested in what argument around Emoji, Manga and Japanese culture are happening in Tokyo this week, please take a look at Katsuhiro Ogata’s proposal [English and Japanese, side by side].

See Also:

A Proposal to Revise a Part of Emoticons in PDAM 8 [pdf]

絵文字が開いてしまった「パンドラの箱」第5回–絵文字と日本マンガの親密な関係:コラム – CNET Japan“>Emoji opened Pandra’s box – relation between Emoji-s and Japanese Mangas – CNET Japan [J]

Mojino Namae – Katsuhiro Ogata’s blog [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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