mixi to Try Overseas Markets

According to our friends over at Asiajin, Japan’s dominant social-networking site mixi‘s CFO Fumiaki Koizumi has recently stated that mixi would like to try to expand it’s services overseas. Asiajin posted a summary of Koizumi’s points which include:

• Mixi wants to accelerate internationalization efforts, which is why the company looks for people with work experience overseas and/or those who can speak multiple languages.
• There’s now a new business unit within Mixi that coordinates internationalization efforts.
• The Chinese subsidiary in Shanghai now has more employees.
• Mixi plans to start hiring people in Asia, the US and Europe.
• Foreigners who just graduated might be another option, starting in fiscal 2012.

(source Asiajin)

As the dominant web presence for social media in Japan (by some accounts up to 80% of the market), mixi is at an interesting turning point.  Simply stated, for it to grow any more it must start to look outside of Japan for business and revenue.  However, therein lies the biggest problem, and one that is also apparent if we start to pull back and look at the Japanese online industry (and possibly Japan itself) as a whole:  Japan’s web presence is not conductive for internationalization.

Let’s take mixi as an example.  The site is largely self-sufficient and has barely any function outside of itself.  In true Japanese fashion, the site’s engineers have taken ideas from around the web (short status updates ala Twitter, apps ala Facebook, even music scrobbling ala Last.fm) and internalized it to use on the mixi site.  The focus has been inward on the mixi experience only.  Contrast this with the proliferation of Facebook’s Like Button across virtually the entire internet.  Facebook’s view seems to be “Facebook as a meeting point for your entire web experience”.  Mixi’s view, on the other hand, seems to be more “mixi as your entire web experience”.

This has worked extremely well in Japan, mostly because of Japan’s low internet literacy rate.  What I mean by this is that Japan, despite having some of the highest broadband penetration rates and best infrastructure in the entire world, generally still uses it’s internet like it was 1998.  Most people who use the internet here use blogs, maybe shop at some online malls, and use sites like mixi.  There has been almost no evolution to “Web 2.0″ standards, in both the content meaning (AJAX) and the context meaning of the “social web”.  While aggregate sites, more fluid information curating, streaming video and overall connectedness is blowing up in the Western online world, Japan is still stuck with a largely static and unchanging reclusive internet.  Even when a paradigm-shifting site like YouTube pops up, instead of integrating with it, Japan creates it’s own version (highly popular NicoNico Douga) and further buries itself in it’s own secluded internet world.

While the questions these ideas raise are numerous, let’s focus again on mixi and it’s own internationalization efforts.  Will this largely Japanese site (in both userbase and philosophy) work outside of Japan?  I think I have already made my opinion quite clear:  it probably won’t, and if it does it will be with great effort.  For mixi to have any appeal outside of Japan is to go against what mixi fundamentally is:  a Japanese social-networking site made specifically for Japanese people.  For mixi to truly excel in international waters, it would have to appeal to many people in a way that they would want to use mixi exclusively, or it would have to broaden it’s functionality outside of itself.  The first option is nigh-impossible, unless it entered a market without any competition (ie Facebook).  The second option seems a lot more difficult: mixi would have to totally remake it’s site, function, interface, and philosophy to at least catch up a little to the competition and rest of the web.  Are they up to the challenge?

It seems to me that even the biggest and best of Japan’s web is doomed to be constrained by the Japanese xenophobic way of thinking.  The point of the internet is to devolve these 20th-century ideas of self-importance and refusal to grow, change, or adapt, and to accept connectedness and freedom of information.  As an example, look at sites like Twitter which have broken into the Japanese market and thrived.  I believe this will become the norm, not the exception.  Japan should integrate things like Twitter and YouTube, instead of simply taking the idea and reworking it for themselves.

Mixi reminds me of a strange combination of old, giant institutions who grow too big and powerful to be able to adapt to the fast-changing world today and new technology using the ideas and power of social-networking.  To see an example of this, look at the rate of mixi’s major updates to the site.  I have been using mixi for years, but have only seen one major revision which added the Twitter-like status updates and Apps ecosystem, along with an interface update .  A site like Facebook or Twitter seems much more fluid with the ability to change seemingly built-in.  Also notice the last point mixi’s CFO listed above:  hire foreign graduates starting fiscal 2012?  This seems like an eternity away in today’s ever-changing minute-by-minute world and is a perfect example of the inability to stay relevant and move fluidly.  I’d like to hear an exec from Facebook, Twitter or even Last.fm talk about plans for fiscal 2012 today.

All-in-all, mixi seems to have a misrepresentation of it’s importance.  Even though it is #1 in Japan, I don’t believe it has any relevance overseas where better, more current and updated products and services abound.  Mixi did well in making a product for it’s not-quite-internet-savvy Japanese userbase, but might not realize the challenge that awaits outside it’s borders.  Mr. Toto from Asiajin summed it up quite nicely in the closing words to his article:  ”Absolutely no one outside Japan is waiting for Mixi.”

(news via Asiajin)