Japan is a country renowned for it’s technological prowess - being on the cutting edge of robotics, hybrid car research, video game entertainment and countless other areas. Strange then, that whilst the rest of the world has seen a huge boom in “Web 2.0″-style services on the internet over the past 12 months, Japan has been somewhat lagging behind. Fear not, however, as Japan is slowly catching up. Here is a quick look at some of the Web 2.0 goodness coming out of Japan and a look at their Western equivalents.
Written by Jon
Firstly, lets get this out of the way - what is Web 2.0? The simple answer to that is…everyone has a different answer. Wikipedia says this in their entry:
“Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online…Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages.”
Which is a very expansive definition, but it’s about as good as we are going to get in two sentences. For this article I have concentrated on several key areas of web services that seem to define the current gamut of Web 2.0 offerings, and have looked at interesting, popular and / or new websites in those areas from Japan and beyond. Let us begin…
Social Networking
Social Networking websites are those that allow users to sign up, make friends, join communities and interact with people from around the world.
50 million people can’t all be wrong!
The West is well-represented by the huge, sprawling networks of places like Myspace, Facebook and Blogger. Interestingly however, despite the fact that Myspace is the veritable poster-boy of social networks, social networks being the poster-boy of Web 2.0…Myspace isn’t all that Web 2.0. Apart from having a very plain, cumbersome design, Myspace doesn’t have the sheen that geeks like myself expect from a web industry leader - for example there is no RSS, lots of page refreshing, the site has extremely ugly urls that help expose the underlying workings of the code, and it is very insecure (although I accept that the risk of being hacked increases exponentially when you have the amount of users that myspace has).
In Japan, social networking is represented mainly by Mixi, with GREE following a distant second. In my opinion, both of these services suffer from the same problems as Myspace - no RSS (presumably a tactic to keep me coming back to the site itself) or other simple method of exporting my data, horrible, long urls and generally quite a “Web1.0″ feature-set, for a genre that is so often labeled automatically as Web2.0…
Video Sharing
Video Sharing websites are those that allow people to upload and share video content quickly and easily.
The almighty YouTube is currently the undeniable king of video sharing. Many others have tried to knock it from its throne, but it has stood firm, despite legal woes and burning through bandwidth (at a cost of $1 million a month).
To my knowledge there is no direct competitor to YouTube in Japan but there is an interesting little mashup* from the boys at fladdict.net, and it is called hatenatube. Hatenatube simply takes popular YouTube videos from a variety of sources and displays a thumb for each one. Clicking on the thumb opens the video in a semi-transparent dark overlay, similar to the lightbox effect. Such a simple idea, but executed very cleanly.
*a mashup can be defined as an original product or service that has been created out of existing products or services.
Podcasting
Everyone is diving into podcasting, but how are we supposed to keep track of all those podcasts? These sites offer a solution…
The West is currently represented mainly by Podcast Alley and Odeo. Both sites offer good solutions to digging through the hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes they have listed. Out of these two only Odeo offers the ability to play podcasts inline, in your browser - Podcast Alley forces you to download the file fully before you can view it.
Newly-released and IMG SRC-produced ZapZap is a podcast directory that lets users decide what is popular and what should be on the front page, whilst also allowing you to mix-and-match a custom playlist of podcast episodes. Web 2.0 technologies are used throughout, such as AJAX / Javascript effects for the commenting and inline playing of audio and video. ZapZap is also bilingual, allowing people to browse content in either Japanese or English.
Productivity
As web technology gets better, we are able to transfer more and more of our desktop applications to the web, for convenience. Online productivity apps are a relatively new, and extremely helpful genre of web services.
Outside of Japan, online productivity applications are best represented by 37signals‘ suite of apps, of which the most well-known is the simple to-do list manager Ta-da Lists. For those who need to manage many different lists at a time, Orchestrate provides a simple, method for handling multiple lists quickly and efficiently.
As this genre of Web 2.0 service is still young, it’s even younger in Japan. Checkpad represents one of the few productivity-oriented web applications in Japan. Providing a similar service to Ta-da Lists, Checkpad differentiates itself by also allowing users to access their lists from their mobile phones.
Start Pages
The idea behind a web-based start page is that when you load up your browser, you get an instant, broad view of what’s happening on the web. Big names such as Yahoo and AOL provide pages of edited content that you can set as your browser homepage, but smaller companies are providing more dynamic, customisable variations to allow your browser homepage to be more relevant to you.
Netvibes is currently the most popular custom web-based start page out there. Featuring a fast-loading AJAX interface, Netvibes provides you with many different options at your disposal from the moment you visit the page. Users can add new panels containing news, pictures, email updates, search boxes and more - and rearrange them around the page to suit their liking.
Japan-based Startforce takes an altogether different approach. Although they don’t explicitly state they are a start-page service, some of their ideology is the same. Rather than providing a panel-based interface like Netvibes, Startforce has attempted to visually emulate a computer’s operating system. Startforce allows you to store and swap files as well as chat with other people, all within an OS-like environment.
Blog Tracking
With the millions of blogs being updated every day, we need some method of keeping track of all that data…
Technorati has done extremely well, positioning itself as the de facto method of finding out what is hot in the blogging world - fending off heavyweight competitors such as google’s blogsearch.
The near-unpronounceable Kizasi provides a similar service to Technorati, but in my opinion provides a clearer method of finding out what bloggers are talking about. The right hand side has a ranking of current popular keywords in blogs, with the left side home to a nice, large chart and a list of all the blogs currently talking about the selected keyword - with an excerpt from each blog. Very clean, very simple.
Industry News / What’s Hot
Various technology and / or Web 2.0-themed blogs and news services have evolved due the 2.0 boom and many are essential for keeping up to date.
Digg continues forward strongly, with it’s recent Digg v3.0 makeover, and industry pundit Michael Arrington at Techcrunch provide invaluable, current industry news to tens of thousands of readers every day.
Techcrunch recently launched Techcrunch Japan which I’m sure will gain a huge following as time goes on. Apart from that, industry news in Japan is probably best seen through the eyes of the 100shiki website. 100shiki has a very simple purpose - showcase one new website a day. Sometimes this is a new web service, sometimes it is just something interesting, but it never fails to be entertaining. Hatena Bookmarks is a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service and is probably one of the best places to look for aggregated tech-related news in Japan, thanks to an army of IT-obsessed users.
Well that about wraps up my little look at Web 2.0 in Japan - if any of you feel I’ve missed somewhere special, please let me know in the comments below!
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