Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Facebook vs. Mixi

Having used the Japanese social networking site mixi.jp for a number of years now, and recently (3 months ago?) started using facebook, I thought I would post my thoughts on the two. I imagine most of the western readers of this site will be familiar with facebook, but less so with its oriental counterpart.

The mixi experience is quite different from the facebook experience. It is a nice orange for starters. Overall the focus of the mixi site is more on communicating about ones life than with facebook. Most people who use mixi keep a diary, and it functions as a kind of blogging system for a lot of users. Commenting is common for most posters, so in a way it combines the best of sites like blogger or wordpress with a social networking platform. on the other hand, features such as galleries in facebook seem much more ‘added on’ and not part of the base design.

Facebook’s design isn’t great, it is stolid, something we would expect a middle manager somewhere, anywhere to give the green light on. Functional and reasonably easy to navigate around, facebook is effective enough at connecting people. This for me has been the thing that entices me with facebook, finding friends from high school and further back in time. Living here in Japan one doesn’t, for example, run into Damien from primary school at the supermarket as one might back in ones home country so it is quite a special feeling to browse through other peoples contact lists and to suddenly have a name that one hasn’t thought about in a very long time pop out.

To give you some idea of mixi usage, mid week there was a TV programme which featured a minor Japanese celebrity, a rakugo performer, whose “job” was to learn how to rap “8 Mile” style. Rap and African American culture is big in Japan so there are a lot of rap groups, most of which aren’t quite as full on as their counterparts across the pacific. However the producers of the show did a great job in finding a pretty hardcore group in Nerima Ward of Tokyo.

The celebrity spent time with them and picked up some of their lingo. As well as learning to use ‘dis’ (as in disrespect), he also picked up the phrase ‘man’ as in ‘whats up man?’ This did the rounds in a lot of workplaces the next day, and was also written about on a lot of people’s diaries on mixi. Over 6000 people wrote about it which is a pretty large number for a reference from a TV programme.

Mixi, as well as having gallery options, has also recently added a video uploader much akin to youtube. Compared with facebook, features such as galleries in mixi seem much less ‘added on’ and more part of the base design. Another feature which i like with mixi is the ‘ashiato’ or footprints feature. This enables one to see who has looked at your page, and to then trace the connections back to them. Narcissistically, it also records the number of visitors to ones page.

In terms of system architecture, mixi was written in Perl, and facebook is in php. I am not sure if this is the cause, but mixi is noticeably faster than facebook. Network speed could be a factor – we all know how much better Japan’s network infrastructure is.

Facebook seems more public, whilst mixi is more private – I think this reflects the two cultures in that Japanese people in general are much more concerned about their privacy, about what is public, and what is private. Mixi also seems more keyboard based whereas Facebook, with its vampires and its bar, pokes and walls (third party applications which allow you to interact with other people) seems to be more mouse based.

Mixi has communities whereas Facebook has networks. On Mixi, one can belong to multiple communities – if you are interested in Mandrake Linux you can join that community, and there are some very obscure communities such as people running Apple OS 7 and below. I myself run the tenkasu community (tenkasu is the rice bubble like by product of making tempura) which has over 40 members – believe it or not.

The Facebook networks are limited to places, workplaces and schools as far as I have been able to work out. Also, as far as I know, one cannot create networks, only suggest them, which isn’t terribly useful if one lives in a country the size of Japan, but fine if you live in Tampa, Florida.

I also used myspace for about 2 days. Myspace was great in that i was able to find a lot of the musicians i was into when i was at university, but i just found the site too slow, the interface badly thought out and the overall design too unattractive to spend much time with it.

Overall I think mixi is a much more successful site than facebook, although the language barrier that exists between Japan and the west means that its popularity will never spread beyond the shores of the land of the rising sun. Perhaps it doesn’t need to.

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If you come from one of the cricket playing nations of the world – which makes cricket the worlds second most popular sport after football, or soccer, or whatever you call it, then you will know that the Cricket World Cup is being held in the wonderful West Indies.

Of course with Japan still living in the shadow of their defeat during World War II to the nuclear power of the Americans, baseball is very much the mainstream sport in these isles, so it is a tricky proposition to catch any of what is a very minority sport under the haze of American hegemony. One option of course is to vacate oneself to the delightful isles of the West Indies, although for the rest of us mere mortals the best option remains the internet.

Luckily there is another option – p2ptv. With the SopCast system installed, you will be able to watch not just the World Cup, but a wealth of other programming besides. And it is all free.

SopCast, according to their about us file is:

Sopcast Team built on Dec, 2004 and focus on the research and application on P2P streaming technology. The first website http://www.sopcast.org is very famous in China and many other countries, is linked and introduced by many aboard website especially in Europe . The sop protocols, developed by SopCast Team, has some specifications like security, high efficiency, extendable and make it easy to support huge users to view the online channels in a standalone server.

The question does arise over who gets what from this. I am sure that if this was based in a country of limited freedom, in the intellectual sense, then this would be closed down as fast as one could say “attack Egypt”, “attack Sweden” or “attack Oman” or whatever the current flavour of the month was. The advertisers certainly do benefit from this service. They get eyeballs on logos, brand recognition – everything they could dream for. The channels themselves dont get anything, unless they work it into their marketing plans (their ability to do so remains to be tested – getting ads for Indian insurance companies is wonderful, but I don’t really need their services living here in Japan).

If you want an interesting viewing platform download sopcast. If you thought this post was crap, then you probably want to stick to fox (and I am not going to do you the convenience of linking to them).

Enjoy the fours, sixes, and drunk kiwis in ridiculous costumes.

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This is part two of a series giving an example of various effects pedals. Like the first video, this was also recorded at First Avenue Studios in Yokohama, Japan. Kojiro played a Fernandes Stratocaster through a Marshall JCM-800 with of course the Pearl Thriller TH-20. This pedal was made in Japan during the 1980’s.

The video was made on my old mac with the imovie package.

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Haven’t been posting much recently. Have been working on a webshop for AquaEffector. The site is a nice little mix of joomla and a shopping cart called virtuemart. Took a fair bit of tweaking to get it up and running, and I would say it is still in the epsilon stage if you think about things in terms of this brave new world.

You can have a poke around at www.aquaeffector.com. As always feedback will be appreciated. I will have a bit more time next week to tidy things up.

Here is a video of a Boss Spectrum SP-1 which is a rare effects pedal made in Japan. It has a very heavy rock sound.

[coolplayer width="480" height="380" autoplay="0" loop="0" charset="GBK" download="1" mediatype=""]
Boss Spectrum SP-1 from AquaEffector by Blizzardboy
[/coolplayer]

Nice matched cut in there if I may say so myself! Shouts to Stanley K.

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It has been about a year and a half since I bought this powerbook and made the change to using a mac. From a design point of view Apple have done a wonderful job and overall I think OS X is an excellent operating system. Coming from a linux background I am used to using open source software and tools, and that is probably the biggest limitation to using Apple computers.

One of the main tools that is missing is a free ftp client. I grew up using gFTP, which is about as solid as a piece of 2 by 4. The most popular FTP clients for OS X are Fetch (off topic, but in Japanese that means fetish), and Transmit – both have 15 day trial policies, after that you have to pay to use them.

I did a bit of a search around last year for an open source ftp client and couldn’t find much of a solution. The answer came when I updated firefox. Now I know a lot of Mac users are reticent to use anything other than safari, but if you install a firefox plugin called FireFTP then you have an FTP client.

FireFTP doesn’t support some things like sFTP or SSH or unicode character filenames. But I haven’t had any problems with using it. When it installs it takes you to a page asking for donations for orphans in the Balkans which is a nice idea – you don’t have to pay, but you can if you appreciate the hard work the developer put into creating the software.

If you need a copy of firefox you can download one here,

and the FireFTP client can be downloaded from the FireFTP site.

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WiFi is up and running! If you are looking for an access point in the village formerly known as Niihari and now part of the great lakeside town of Tsuchiura we have one. Happy war driving.

A bit of a mission, and it seems to cut out intermittently but I am sure we will get that sorted out over the next few days. We ended up going with a NEC wireless broadband router (ATerm WR6650S) over a couple of Buffalo routers, as the support is better. Took a bit of thinking to realise we had to connect to the router via 192.168.0.1 and set up our connection through that. The whole thing is quite complex, with the ADSL line through NTT and then Plala as the provider.

The joys of deregulation. Getting the internet hooked up was a whole lot easier in China, despite the guy who set it up never having seen a Powerbook before, let alone one in English.

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Well the move is over and we are in the final stages of getting sorted in our new house. We are now living in the city of Tsuchiura in the province of Ibaraki about 60 kilometers north of Tokyo and 40 kilometers from Narita airport.

Got the internet connected yesterday, so still catching up with email. 2 weeks without the internet was a nice little break, quite rare in this day and age. One of my friends commented that he had a similar experience when he moved within Tokyo – it seems that despite being the second largest economy in the world Japanese businesses, NTT in this case are still safely floating somewhere around 1960. Switching on a phone line these days is all done via computer, so why it would need 2 weeks I have no idea. But it is done!

Now we are heading out to hunt down a wifi kit. Bang!

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I don’t normally write about computer games or video games for that matter. I am not really much of a games player. I used to enjoy UltimaIV on my Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and networked games of Red Alert when I was at University, but since I came to Japan I haven’t played much apart from a bit of Pokemon on a cute little yellow game boy a friend of mine gave me. I am not into anime either unlike a lot of Westerners living in Japan.

However, a friend of mine from New Zealand has been working on a game called GripShift for the PS3. And they just released the game for testing by Sony so I thought I would give it a plug here. The graphics look pretty cool, cartoonish and fun. For me a good game is like a good book. When you play, if the game is good enough you “suspend your disbelief”, that is, you forget that you are involved in the act of reading or playing. Hopefully next year I will get a chance to see if this is true for GripShift. You can read bitshifter’s post on the release of GripShift or go directly to the GripShift site.

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http://www.technorati.com

According to our ranking at Technorati we are number 1,148,236 in the world of blogs! My other blog is number 689,092 which considering the other blog is for poetry and other dilettante scribbles makes the results kind of amusing:)

It will be interesting to follow this as we keep adding stuff to this site. Making the top 100 would be nice. But slowly slowly.

What is Technorati? From their site:

About Technorati

Technorati is the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.

What is a weblog? A weblog, or blog, is a personal journal on the web. Weblogs express as many different subjects and opinions as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership while others are primarily intended for a close circle of family and friends.

The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a ‘conversation’ than to a library — which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.

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