Mixi Experience——What the heck?

Recently,  I hijacked my cosmetic surgery friend’s ( in Tokyo)  –Mixi.jp  account. I did this for various reasons , one being that since I have a web development firm that works in all cultures and languages I wanted to gain an understanding of this. Secondly,  its very hard to get your own mixi.jp account unless you have a Japanese cell phone so I just stole his. Sorry Taka.

Mixi by the way is a Facebook on steroids , for those of you who want some understanding of this. It has a login page which list , your profile , friends and what your friends are saying in their blogs. The blog summary  is a very popular item. If you see something interesting you can click and follow that persons journal. There is one the big differences I noticed between the myspace type things and the facebooks of the world and Mixi. The Japanese take their blogs very seriously and there are millions of them. Many Japanese house wives entire world seem to be blog-o-centric.

One other thing I noted is that “everyone is paranoid” which means that not only are the internal security controls very tight,  but most people unlike Face book or Myspace will not put their own picture up. Its Iconic images or many men for example will have woman’s pictures as theirs probably of some models. Also of course there are  the Japanese Pokeman type images seen,  as well as flowers , fruits vegetables etc. This makes it difficult to tell who you are clicking on. In my case its even more difficult because I do not read Hiragana, Katakana or Kanji,  as of this date. So I spend half my time with translation software trying to guess what they are saying. This can be most difficult. Take for example the case of a place called First Kitchen which is a food store in Japan. The Japanese have a funny habit of abbreviating many things so they shorten the words– like Family Mart becomes Fami-ma. Well according to some sources First Kitchen becomes ” fukkin” when they speak abbreviated format. So as you are reading someone’s blog it is feasible that they say ” My friend and I went fukkin”. Sorry for that,  but it illustrates my point of possible miscommunication very well. So when I translate I do not get the full meaning of the blogs.

?????  or  ???? I apologize to those offended,  but I think I have this right.

I am also informing you that unless you know Japanese well you probally will not make any friends. I have two friends, my  Japanese web designer and someone who I have no idea or what they are.

The other interesting thing is you can see who visited your page unlike facebook or myspace. I for example was like an elephant in a china shop clicked around not even know what I was clicking and someone told me their friend asked them why I left my footprint? Perhaps they thought I was a trouble maker?  At any rate I suppose one must be senistive to these issues.

Overall I like this mixi. From a web development point of view I did see some advertisments from some cosmetic surgeons and other things. I dont know if viral type marketing like one can see in Youtube or Myspace is possible. Yet I think is see some value but not like in American Social Media.

I have not discussed with my Japanese associate yet but at some point we will find an answer with regard to using Mixi.jp as a marketing tool for our clients. As far as plastic surgery marketing–well like I said I did see two Japanese cosmetic surgeons advertise. I will keep you updated in any significant issues of Mixi but dont expect much until I can learn more Japanese language.

Doctor 808