BuddyBuddy

» see buddybuddy.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

korea ran its own internet in the 2000s. their isp story, their search engine (naver), their social network (cyworld), their pc-cafe ecosystem (pc-bang on every block in seoul) and their own messenger stack. buddybuddy sat at the messenger layer for a generation of korean teenagers. i was on the other side of that wall, on msn in turkey through the same window, watching from press articles and screenshots later. korea was a market i could read about but had no first-hand contact with through these years.

buddybuddy launched on january 13 2000, run by a small seoul company called buddy buddy co. ltd. the timing put it just before the great korean broadband rollout, kt and hanaro pushed adsl into apartment buildings starting around 2000, and pc-bangs (the korean internet kafe form) were already on every street in seoul by then. buddybuddy rode that wave on the desktop. by 2002 it was running paid premium tiers (etnews ran a story about the paid service announcement in january of that year), and by 2003 to 2004 it was the messenger of choice for korean high school and college users.

wemade entertainment, the korean gaming company best known for the legend of mir mmo, bought buddybuddy in 2004 and ran it for the next eight years. the deal made sense at the time, buddybuddy had the eyeballs and wemade had the games to plug in. the model was the same one cyworld would push later, layer mini-games and a paid item economy on top of the messenger account. the actual numbers from this period are hard to pin down outside korean-language sources, but contemporary press treated it as the dominant youth messenger in the country alongside msn for the office crowd and nateon for the cyworld crowd.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed in korea ~

the cultural detail i find striking from outside is the pc-bang context. in seoul of 2003, a high school student would walk into a pc-bang after class, pay maybe one thousand won an hour, sign into buddybuddy, play starcraft or lineage with friends already in the room, all at the same time. the messenger was on the screen at the same time as the game. status updates and quick messages flew across the row of monitors.

the design copied the msn template closely. contact list down the left, chat windows, status icons, a profile photo, a status message line that everyone used to post song lyrics or mood updates. honestly, the korean addition was the cute graphical theme layer, custom backgrounds, animated emoticons, character skins you could buy with the buddybuddy paid currency. cyworld would later push the same model into a fully gamified social network skinning system. buddybuddy was the messenger version of that aesthetic, one of the first places korean teenagers spent real money on visual customization.

~ what killed it ~

this part you had to be in korea for, and i was not. the smartphone era ended every desktop messenger globally. korea was hit early because the iphone went on sale in november 2009 there, and kakaotalk launched in march 2010 as a free sms-style chat for korean smartphones. by 2011 kakaotalk had crossed 10 million users in a country of 50 million. by early 2012 the country had effectively moved its everyday messaging to phones, and buddybuddy on a desktop was visibly empty.

the wind-down announcement came on april 17 2012. messaging functions ended april 30. the game and music portal pieces stayed up another few weeks. final shutdown was may 25 2012, the domain buddybuddy.co.kr went down on august 31 of the same year. the granite tower newspaper at korea university ran a "goodbye to yesterday and hello to tomorrow" piece on the closure that treated it as the visible end of an era. the same year nateon also collapsed in active user terms, though sk communications kept the brand running.

~ what got buried with it ~

buddybuddy took down a contact graph that belonged to a specific cohort of korean users, mostly people who had been in middle or high school between roughly 2002 and 2008. these were the same users who would migrate to cyworld for status updates and kakaotalk for messaging. by 2014 the desktop-messenger era in korea was over completely. buddybuddy was the canonical youth client of that era, distinct from nateon (cyworld-attached, office-friendly) and from msn (international, work-coded).

korean web culture has the same pattern as taiwanese web culture, a dominant local product runs for a decade or so on a national user base, gets swept aside when the smartphone era arrives, leaves only screenshots and yearbook-style retrospectives in the local-language press. wretch in taiwan, cyworld in korea, mixi in japan all match the shape. buddybuddy fits inside that cluster as the messenger half of korea's part of it.

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