Motoko’s weblog

Nagano police station received a report on April 24 about a bomb threat posted on Wikipedia Japan’s Nagano station page and Beijing Olympic page. The post said, “A hand made bomb will destroy Nagano station at noon on April 26. It will kill passengers, station workers and everyone there.” The post has been deleted, and Nagano police is investigating the case. Beijing Olympic’s torch relay is scheduled to go through Nagano on April 26.

User generated content is great, but it’s also true that the benefits of Web2.0 can also become issues and problems to the site owners and users. Beside the obvious issues such as:

• too much information makes it difficult to find what you are looking for,
• many conflicting information (not sure what to believe),
• difficult to manage and to control new content,

I think it’s a bigger problem in Japan because of their tendency to:

• believe what they read, especially on the popular sites and the authoritative sites,
• believe that many user generated content are monitored and trustworthy,
• believe that it’s secure and safe,

and sadly, the anonymity side of these application brings the worst of some people, which leads to problems like this bomb threat on Wikipedia, and hate messages on blogs and rapidly growing unofficial school sites.

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has “Web2.0 study group”. I’ve read their meeting minutes. The discussion has been focused on how to implement Web 2.0 application rather than the issues and the problems with them. MIC also has the Online Information Security site, which talks about the virus, spam mails, online shopping, security, privacy, phishing, etc., but nothing about the user generated content.

I value and believe in the freedom of speech, but I’m also concerned about these problems, which will only increase in near future, and won’t go away. Is it a site owner’s responsibility to monitor and manage the content? Maybe to the certain level, but if they over do it, it would kill what great about these applications.

Last year, Cabinet Office Government of Japan (CAO) conducted a survey about the Internet Security Awareness. It shows that 45% of people has concern about the safety of Internet, mainly about the scams and the security issues. I thought it was interesting that the online security issues related to dating sites and community sites were limited to children under 18 on that survey. More than 70% of people think that the site owner is responsible to monitor and manage the content.

While Japan’s popular Social Networking Services (SNS) still increasing the number of registered users (mixi with 14 million users and Gree with 4 million users), it’s a fact that the “newness” of these services has worn out. Many people are now on these SNS sites less frequently and spending less time.

goo Research and Internet.com’s survey results show that people started to lose interests in SNS sites about 10 months ago. Since mixi opened in February 2004, has the SNS market in Japan peaked out already? If so, what do SNS sites need to do to survive or even to increase active users?

With my experience, it was fun to be invited and to invite friends to join these sites at the beginning. Till then, I was visiting lots of websites owned by my friends to communicate by posting comments on their BBSs. It was getting to be a lot of work, and was definitely time consuming. When mixi opened in 2004, we invited each other to join so that we can all communicate at one place. It was great. Then we started to join other SNS sites. I’m now registered at 20+ social media sites. Trying to check in and update these sites is like 2003 all over again. Since there aren’t much differences among these SNS sites, you just need 1 or 2 sites where most of your friends and contacts are. And, I’m sure that’s what many SNS users in Japan are thinking. If you are not mixi, differentiating your services from others is the key to success or survival in next 12 months. That fact that many Japanese are now looking into “specialized SNS sites” (i.e., music only, local area specific, or age specific) backs up my point. Sure, these sites may never become as big as mixi or Gree, but they would probably have more active user rate.