Mixi is one of the biggest social networks in Japan.  They have over 15 million users, but the problem is that most of their users don’t give their real identities.  This is where Facebook’s strength lies because their users are willing to publish a lot of their information and even 15 million photos per day. 

The Associated Press gives an example about an individual of Kae Takahashi.  Takahashi gives publishes pictures on MySpace with the clothes she designs and puts pictures of herself up on the site.  But on Mixi, she doesn’t put her real information anywhere on the site.  On Mixi, she says that she is an 88 year old named Christmas. 

“The vast majority of mixi’s roughly 15 million users don’t reveal anything about themselves,” states Jay Alabaster of the AP. 

YouTube’s Japanese users don’t often put videos of themselves on the site too.  They put more videos of their pets.  On Match.com, most of the Japanese users of the site put their real photos on the site.  Whereas most U.S. users are happy to do so.

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In the past year, Facebook’s traffic in Japan has more than tripled.  This past year, Facebook was translated into the Japanese language.  However, Mixi.jp is still the dominant social network in Japan.  mixi, Inc. (TYO3:2121) had 12.7 million unique visitors this past June.  Facebook had 538,000, MySpace had 1.2 million, Orkut had 638,000, and Gree had 455,000. 

“The competition between social networks in Japan is beginning to heat up with the recent introduction of the Japanese language version of Facebook,” stated Maru Sato, Managing Director at comScore Japan. “The popular social networking site’s launch of Spanish, French and German language sites earlier this year resulted in strong traffic growth in these markets. If this is a reliable indication, we can expect to see Facebook’s growth in Japan follow a similar trend.”

As Facebook is growing in popularity worldwide, there are many Facebook clones appearing.  These clones include Xiaonei and StudiVZ.  Fed up with the duplication, Facebook had decided to take legal action against StudiVZ last month.

Related Link:
1. MarketWatch

According to the WSJ, Mixi’s shares have dropped 28% since its astounding IPO. The shares have dropped because of Japan’s competitive online sector. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. There was a lot of hype around the Mixi IPO which caused its strikingly high share price. The snewstock price was inevitable going to come down. I just did not expect it to happen so soon.

It would not surprise me to see the boys on Sandhill frolic up and down the road this week in light of the Mixi IPO. Social networks are on fire again thanks to Mixi. Thousands of young entrepreneurs can revive their dreams of becoming overnight billionaires just like Kenji Kasahara. I bet the words “Hey if he can do it, so can I.” are fogging the minds of every technology entrepreneur out there. Plus Kenji still owns 64% of Mixi! Yes I said 64%. That’s astounding in a time where most founders hold no more then 10% of their company after a few rounds of investment and stock dilution. Mixi is valued at around $1.9 billion with only 5.7 million users. Yea I’d be happy if I owned 64% of it.

Let’s list some of Mixi’s features that could possibly have led to its success.

1. Like Orkut, Mixi is invite only. That means you have to know someone in the network to join it. Unfortunately, if you are an anti-social emo kid with no friends, getting someone to send you an invitation is probably no walk in the park. But hey, who said life is easy. The invite only model seems to work well for social network sites. By nature, we want what we can’t easily get. Also, you must be 18 to join.

2. You can not be alone on Mixi or you get booted out. If the number of your friends falls to 0 for a certain period, you have to leave the community.

3. You can not have more then 1,000 friends. While most social networks encourage having as many “friends” as possible, many of which are random people, Mixi encourages you to interact with real friends.

4. Your footprint is left throughout the network as you visit profile pages of members. To a certain extent, this is a cool feature. But I am not a fan of features like this. Privacy is important to me on social networks.

5. Like MySpace groups, Mixi has communities you can join.

6. Text messaging (Mobile) capabilities allows members to stay in touch with their Mixi friends from anywhere.

7. There is a music player that allows you to add music tracks to your profile.

Seems like the second and third features are the only ones unique to Mixi. In my opinion, this only means that Mixi had no secret recipe to thank for its success. Lucky for Mixi, its competition in the Japanese social network sector was limited. For a social network, limited competition is a very good thing. I am sure we will see a lot more social networks come out of Asia. India, we are waiting…