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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