At the beginning of April, I was almost writing up an article about how the Eastern Japan earthquake affected social media battle. Since the end of 2010, Japanese traditional media had been in great favor of Facebook as "the next big thing from US". Their endless coverage was very similar with what was done with Twitter in 2009-2010, and eventually, Twitter's appearance on mass media became rather small.

However, the disaster changed the game. Facebook might have been a good platform with its real-name policy if Japanese Facebook penetration was not about 2% of population. (Although the real victims in the disaster areas could not use any social media by black-out,) Twitter was the cure for tens of millions people who wanted to confirm their friends safety under disconnected phone. Twitter also helped that people who had to walk back to their home at the night of the earthquake in greater Tokyo. Many raw information (, false rumors and corrections as well) were circulated on it for weeks.

A blogger Edgefirst summed up that how Japanese newspaper companies utilized/opened their Twitter accounts to cover up their stopped and delayed distribution. Twitter accounts of some Tohoku region newspapers added 500-700% followers. National paper's official accounts got notable gain, too. Generally speaking, Japanese newspapers are anti-internet with fear for losing their readers, but this disaster seemed to encourage web amiable factions.

Non-Japanese residents' English activities were huge on Facebook. Many support from overseas were discussed on Facebook as well. But in Japanese language, there were less activities happened from Facebook, if you compare them with Twitter and other web services.

Here is the population graph of Facebook Japan users recorded by Socialbakers after the quake. Screenshot on April 4th.

The number of Japanese Facebook users were sharp rising around the release of the movie "The Social Network" in early January, then, March 11th quake completely stopped the trend. The graph above is from April 4th.

Then, on April 5th, something strange was observed on Socialbakers (and Facebook's ad tool, as Socialbakers is only recording numbers from it).

In Japan, as Serkan Toto pointed out on his blog, half a million user joined Facebook in a day. That made over 3 million users, Facebook population increased 20%.

In China, ReadWriteWeb showed that over quarter million Facebook users disappeared on the same April 5th.

I checked other countries in East Asia. South Korea lost 100,000(2.5%).

Taiwan lost one million active users(10%) on the same day!

So it seems as if massive users moved out from Taiwan and China to Japan. If it was opposite way, it could happen as some people evacuated from Japan to other Asian countries. (still the number is unbelievable high, though)

There were no campaigns like "changing your location to Japan on FB (for showing support or something)" as far as I know.

Facebook Japan Paused Growth By Earthquake, But Gains Back From… China?

Here is some recommended reading, probably of value for just about everybody reading Asiajin: in 2007, Students at Singapore Management University have created a wiki called "Digital Media Across Asia", which now covers a total of eleven countries (in English), namely:

• Australia
• China
• Hong Kong
• India
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Taiwan
• Vietnam

On the site, the wiki is being called the "world's most comprehensive wiki dedicated to digital media throughout Asia", and I think this could well be true.

The wiki is updated 2-3 times per year (only the students themselves and faculty can edit it), and it's a great resource for country-specific information on social networks, mobile, search engines, video sharing platforms, etc. etc.

Wiki Covering 11 Countries: Digital Media Across Asia

Major Japanese trading (and Fortune 500) company Itochu is making a foray into the Asian e-commerce space. According to The Nikkei, Itochu made two investments recently, having bought into Hong Kong-based online shopping company Fortune Link (website is currently down) and Taiwan-based PChome.

About 10% of each of these sites have been acquired by Itochu, The Nikkei reports. What's interesting is that the Japanese company seems to have made the investments with the Chinese market in mind.

For example, Fortune Link has built up a an express delivery network in China with the local (state-owned) postal services to get orders to customers faster. The site's core business is to sell brand name products to Chinese online shoppers. Itochu plans to supply clothing, cosmetics and other apparel to Fortune Link and plans to have a total of 10,000 of such items listed in six months.

PChome, one of Taiwan's biggest online shopping portals, currently offers more than 3 million different items (Alexa says it's Taiwan's No. 12 website overall). Itochu is reportedly planning to support PChome's entry into other parts of Asia by taking over product procurement.

Japan’s Itochu Invests In Hong Kong And Taiwanese E-Commerce Sites

Japan's tabloid magazine SPA![J] reported that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs had been barred from taking Ninja throwing stars aboard his private jet plane at an airport in Osaka, and Apple's spokesman denied it and told Bloomberg News that Steve had visited in Kyoto but the incidents described were a pure fiction.

Taiwan's NMA (Next Media Animation) News, however, created an animation film describing the incident, regardless of its authenticity, and posted it on YouTube.

The film started with the scene that Steve bought the throwing stars at a souvenir shop.   Then he was accused by an airport official of taking them as his carry-on baggage.   Finally he angered and turned himself to a ninja.

See Also:

• Apple Says The Steve Jobs Ninja Stars Story Is "Pure Fiction" (Business Insider)
• Taiwan’s Apple Daily: A New Style Of Making News Visible Gets The World’s Reputation

Is Steve Stopped At Airport? May Be Fiction But Now Animated

Japan's biggest business daily, The Nikkei, today reports that the country's biggest e-commerce company, Rakuten, is planning to links its Japanese and Taiwanese online malls so that customers from these countries can order products from both Japan- and Taiwan-based merchants.

According to the paper, the integration will take place by the end of this year. But it's not going to be a full-scale integration, at least not initially.

Rakuten apparently plans to translate the web sites of some 75 Taiwanese stores into Japanese and make them accessible through the domestic website. Shoppers living in Japan can then order various products from Taiwan, for example fashion items or groceries, through Rakuten's Japanese site.

Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan, which was established in 2007, will get significantly more Japanese retailers. According to the plan, Taiwanese customers will be able to choose between a whopping 16 million products from 7,800 Japanese Rakuten stores - as early as by September this year.

Rakuten caused huge splashes with its multi-million dollar acquisitions of American e-commerce platform Buy.com and France's Priceminister earlier this year. By linking its Taiwanese and Japanese online malls, Rakuten follows the strategy of Yahoo Japan Shopping (Japan's second largest e-commerce site), which is now linked to Taobao, a major shopping platform in China.

Report: Rakuten To Link Japan And Taiwan Online Malls

Can you think of a great mobile or web application that's either made in an Asian country or specifically geared towards users in this region? Or have you developed such an application yourself?

Then you should nominate and/or vote for your favorite app in the "Top 50 Apps In Asia" program that e27, a startup community from Singapore, have set up. The goal is to identify the coolest mobile and web apps in Asia and give them some serious airtime and other perks (more in the FAQ below).

The Top 50 Apps page is already pre-populated with apps from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, India, and the Philippines. But there should be room for many, many more.

The program is part of Accelerate 2010, an apparently huge technology industry event that's going to be held in Singapore from September 22-23 (register from here/early bird info in the FAQ below). South East Asian telecom behemoth SingTel and venture fund Neoteny Labs are the other organizations behind the conference.

Here's a quick "Top 50 Apps In Asia"-FAQ that e27 has put together:

“Top 50 Apps In Asia”: Help Accelerate 2010 Identify The Best Asia-Related Mobile And Web Apps

Asiajin held a readers meet-up event in Taipei on Sunday. Several Taiwanese geeks reading our blog came together for networking, and exchanged their perspective on the tech scenes of Taiwan and Japan with Asiajin contributors Akky, Shunichi and Masaru.

Here's a summary of what we were talking about and what we've learned.

• Micro-blog services such as Plurk and Twitter have regional characteristic in the level of service activity and user engagement.
• What are Taiwan's most popular web service top 100.
• Japanese Internet users prefer to write about what they eat for lunch on their blogs.
• In Taiwan, you have to expose your face on your blog in order to make your readers believe you. Otherwise, the readers consider you as being irresponsible for your words.
• Forum is the most popular part of the Taiwanese Blogosphere as well as that of Mainland China.
• Taiwanese entrepreneurs Jerry Yang (Yahoo!'s co-founder), Steve Chen (YouTube's co-founder) and Kai-Fu Lee (the founding president of Google China) - All moved from Taiwan to the U.S. in their early days. Most of the meet-up participants believe Taiwan has not born the talented web business players, but the U.S. education system has highly contributed to it.
• Most of Taiwanese job sites have numbers in their domain names.
• Taiwanese domestic tech market is so small that Taiwanese start-ups make their interest move into the global common platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone.
• Approximately a half of all Internet traffic in Taiwan is dominated by Taiwanese Yahoo!(雅虎奇摩)[C]. That's why it's so hard for new start-ups to be launched and survive.
• You need to get an ICP license to launch a website in Mainland China. And you'll be also ordered to place servers physically in the country to be authorized by the Chinese government.
• A micro social network service in Mainland China, Renjian (人间网, meaning human being. Inaccessible temporarily as of this writing.) is now so popular. It has features similar to the combination of Twitter and IRC, and looks like Google Wave.
• When the two sides of the Taiwan Strait shake hands on the ECFA, Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, it makes Taiwan much easier to do business in Mainland China. The participants expect they will be able to enter the Mainland and invest there as easily as do so in Hong Kong.
• In order to launch a web business in Mainland China, a Taiwanese company has to set up a joint venture with a Chinese company.
• Both sides over the strait use the same language, but doing business in Mainland China is very hard due to a number of complicated regulations.
• iPeen(愛評網)[C] is a Taiwan's popular social network specializing in introducing good places to dine.  It started three years ago and the business goes well so far.
• In Taiwan, the population of Facebook users has rapidly raised in the last six months because Facebook app Happy Farm(开心农场) attracts the users. The app is developed by Shanghai-based social app developer Five Minutes Inc.(五分钟)[C]. The rapid growth of Facebook users in the country follows Taiwanese Yahoo's social network service Wretch(無名小站)[C] and will overtake it very soon.
• There's only one Internet start-up who has ever succeeded IPO in Taiwan. The country's main industry is still remaining in semi-conductor manufacturing business, there's no boost for breeding more tech business.
• When a Taiwanese start-up goes to a venture capital for fundraising, they are always requested to focus on the market of Mainland China.

That was a great opportunity to see all who love Asiajin in the city. Thank you for coming by, guys.

See Also:

• Asiajin Blog Readers Meet-up at Mr. Brown Coffee
  Asiajin（亞洲人）部落格讀者聚會@伯朗咖啡 [C]

• Life Dripping: Asiajin Blog Readers Meet-up at Mr. Brown Coffee
  生活點滴: Asiajin（亞洲人）部落格讀者聚會@伯朗咖啡[C]

Event Wrap-up: Asiajin Readers Meet-up In Taipei

Nii-hao, Taiwan!

Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto is now in Taiwan. On Saturday, he was invited to have a presentation on Japanese social media and tech scenes at Chili Ideas Party, a serial meet-up organized by Taipei-based Chili Consulting[C] who has been serving Taiwan's tech community. Asiajin co-founder Shunichi Arai and author Masaru IKEDA also visited Taipei to join the event.

More than three dozens of Taiwanese web service entrepreneurs, engineers and business developers came together at Chili's office to learn what's happening in the Japanese web industry and the mobile service market.

Inside[C], a Taipei-based and group-edited blog on social media and mobile app developments, has well summarized what we've been talking about. We appreciate their rapid work.

• 日本重量級科技部落格Asiajin在台演講速記：日本最新網路發展趨勢
  Japan's Tech Blog Asiajin Visits Taiwan And Presents On Japanese Internet Trends [C]

You can watch the first ten minutes of the presentation below. (Due to technical difficulties, we have no recorded video for the rest of the presentation. Sorry for your inconvenience.)

The presentation slides that Akky has made and used at the event is available below. Just click on it to flick through. (If the slides are not appeared appropriately, check out this link).

See Also:

• CNET Asia: Akky from Asiajin on the Japanese Tech Scene

Asiajin Meets Chili: Akky Presents Japanese Tech Scene At Taipei’s Tech Community

Asiajin co-founder Akky Akimoto(@akky), Shunichi Arai(@araipiyo) and author Masaru Ikeda(@masaruikeda) are now staying in Taipei and will have a readers meet-up event on Sunday.

If you're interested in attending it, please subscribe to this Plancast link to keep you update with the latest information. (We'll keep this blog post update as well.)

大きな地図で見る

Venue: Mr. Brown Coffee Shop, National Taipei Univ. of Technology (伯朗咖啡館 台北科大店), Zhongxiao Xingsheng Station(忠孝新生站) of Taipei Metro
http://www.ipeen.com.tw/shop/33236

Time: 2pm, January 10th on Sunday, 2010, Taiwan Standard Time.

(The picture of Taipei 101 shown above is reproduced from Skyscrapers of World under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.)

Update: Asiajin To Host Readers Meet-up in Taipei This Weekend

The world's most successful professional golfer Tiger Woods is now facing adultery scandal.   Taiwan's gossip news media Apple Daily (owned by Hong Kong's Nextmedia) made 3-D CG videos on his car crash and what might have happened.   Some of the videos were put on YouTube and marked 2 million views in the last ten days.   New York Times praised it as "the new world of Maybe Journalism", and the other world news media have used the videos on their news commentaries.

Apple Daily set up a CG news production division consisting of several dozen animators/programmers and started news distribution last month.   The division chief says, they started it because the younger generation doesn't read paper-printed news and its circulation volume is getting smaller day by day.

Tiger Woods crashed a car in the midnight.  His wife smashed a car window and saved him.  But many doubts remained.

Foreign media are in scramble to reproduce Apple Daily's Action News on their shows.

See Also:

• YouTube Channel: Apple Action News (Hong Kong)

Taiwan’s Apple Daily: A New Style Of Making News Visible Gets The World’s Reputation