Mixi To Turn Off Its Unique Footprint Function
Mixi, Japan’s largest Facebook-type social network service, today announced that they would change their ashiato(footprint) service from June 13th.
Mixi’s footprint is a feature to show you which your network friend browsed your page (profile, diary, photo, etc.) at how many seconds/minutes ago.
By this, Mixi in early days acquired users stickiness, by making polite Japanese users worried, like “oh, my friend A read my diary 5 minutes ago, I will be impolite if I will not leave footprint on her page”.
Also, after the East Japan Earthquake, this footprint worked well for people to check if their not-so-serious friends had come back online.
The release said that the feature will be remodeled to “the last week visitors” list, less real-time. Here is the sample image of the planned new page.
Mixi explains that footprint is not so important nowadays as some of Mixi features like Mixi Voice (microblog) does not mark footprints, and Mixi Iine(Like) covers some light communications with your friends. But I can not see why they have to make it less real-time at this point.
This kind of change must cause lots of refusal responses if it was done, say in 2005, however, I have not observed them both in Mixi or outside.
Akky Akimoto
Latest posts by Akky Akimoto (see all)
- Asahi Reports Mixi To Begin Free Call Service, Mixi Denies - May 19, 2013
- 22 Million Yahoo! Japan ID Could Be Leaked - May 18, 2013
- Facebook Japan Replaces Its Head Following To Mixi - May 17, 2013
- Japan’s Most Annoying Website To Be Shut Down Soon - May 16, 2013
- Mixi Appoints A New President. CEO Kasahara To Be A Chairman - May 15, 2013
