Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook

Already this series has been examining the growth of Facebook in Japan, the issues it faces and its efforts to combat its initial stagnation.

There’s no getting around the social networking site’s global success. Nielsen figures for May indicate that its usership increased 18% and it will likely secure a 17.7% share of the U.S. online advertising market for 2011, overtaking Yahoo’s 13.1%.

Internet surveys by Mobile Marketing Data Labo. and Metaphase have revealed fairly clear local trends. In particular, users in their twenties and thirties are rapidly increasing, and businesses are starting to see returns on the “like” functions on their official Facebook pages.

MMD’s April survey of 152 — admittedly, not a vast number — SNS users found that Twitter had by far the most success with consumers following corporate accounts (55.9%). Facebook came second with 35.5%. Meanwhile, separate year-long tracking of Twitter and Facebook among 1,300 social media users revealed large gains in Twitter usage for users in their twenties and thirties, but a slight dip among teenagers. More decisively, Facebook saw zero movement among teenagers in the same period but massive jumps of 30% and 40% for users in their twenties and thirties respectively.

The Metaphase June survey of 300 users found that over 60% of users who log in to Facebook at least 3 times a month were clicking “like” on official corporate Facebook pages, and thus sharing brand content with their friends. Over a third of these users recognized that Facebook offered unique information and content on these pages and over 30% of users who “liked” a company’s page also actually purchased their services.

The suggestion is that the young digital native generation is still preoccupied with localized sites, but slightly more mature users are perhaps starting to turn away from the typical Japanese need for anonymity on SNS. In particular, no doubt upwardly mobile and entrepreneurial types see great benefits to Facebook and to utilization of the media as a promotional tool, as opposed to merely for viewing blogs about cats and meals. (Roughly 98.7% of all Japanese online content revolves around those two themes. Probably.)

Of course, anonymity has been one of the key differences between Facebook and mixi, but, perhaps aware that Facebook is at last making some inroads here, mixi has just recently introduced display changes so that your friends’ full names are visible. This is not necessarily a sign that mixi is abandoning its protection of user privacy, as previously it has flirted with this kind of change, only to back down following member hostility.

Bijin Tokei Goes National

Bijin-Tokei, the website clock service that features ordinary beautiful girls (”bijn”) on the street holding up boards with the time, has been a favorite of this blog for some time, and is no stranger to product collaborations, numerous spin-offs and imitators, and even updates on the state of Tokyo’s power supply.

In late June the site re-launched, now offering you simultaneously perusal of the ladies from different regions and, temptingly, even a voting function now. The girls with the most votes graduate to SUPER bijin-tokei, which offers a kind of crowd-sourced Japanese version of the “Beauty Map” study by the dubious British eugenicist Francis Galton.

3D game apps on Gree

Remember all the hype last year about 3D TVs that did not require glasses? The trend is still plodding along and now appears to be spreading to mobile gaming. Gree has started offering smartphone 3D apps using Unity, an American game development tool. Among the first titles there is CosmoLightning for iOS and Billiards by Gree for the Android.

CosmoLightning features a light ball that can be slid around the screen by your fingers, whereas Billiards by Gree is of course a version of billiards, but with 3D visuals and sound. Both games are free for registered Gree users. Neither sounds particularly exciting to this blogger but often the simplest of games win the most hearts.

This is the latest in a series of blogs based on newsletters provided by our local research partner, INterRIDE Inc.

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