Docomo Community [J], a social networking service run by NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest cellphone carrier, started March 2009, is now available to other carriers, No.2 KDDI au and No.3 Softbank Mobile.
Docomo Community was designed to let you share photos, notes and diary with your family and friends for free, driven by cellphone but also accessible from PC.
Although it is a free service by the market dominating NTT Docomo, the latest number of registered member we heard is 100 thousands on last July. 100 thousands is pretty small when you compare it with over 10 million Mixi, Gree and Mobage-Town.
This month, Docomo announced that they open the social networking service to cellphone users on another cellphone network, KDDI au and Softbank Mobile. Now most of Japanese cellphone users can join the networking and socialize online on there.
Can NTT recognize users coming from other telecom companies? I thought telecom can only recognize its own users by unique “user id”, which is attached in HTTP header.
Japan’s cellphone terminal ID is popular way to track users but it is not the only one method. You may use, for example, traditional user/password, too. Problem is Japanese featured phone browsers do not have password manager so service providers keep providing that “one click login”.
Gree had returned back from chasm of death by mobile version, and it was heavily supported by KDDI au. But they could get a lot of Docomo and Softbank users. Now few people remember that there are some capital relationship between Gree and KDDI.
I think Docomo Community’s poor performance comes from lack of strategy and lack of company-wide support promotion.