Cyworld US

» see us.cyworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A social network is not a product. It is a list of the people you already know, and that list does not travel with the software. Every attempt to export one has run into the same wall, and Cyworld US ran into it harder than most, because the thing being exported was so obviously working at home that nobody in the room thought to ask what exactly was working.

In Korea, Cyworld was not a website so much as a public utility. Something in the region of nine out of ten Koreans under twenty had a minihompy, a small decorated room with a cartoon avatar in it, and the whole economy ran on dotori, acorns, bought with real money and spent on wallpaper and background music. It was profitable years before anyone in the West had solved that, and it had solved it through virtual goods rather than advertising, which at the time made it look like the future.

So SK Communications, the SK Telecom subsidiary that ran it, announced a US expansion in October 2005, opened a thirty-person office in San Francisco, and put roughly ten million dollars into building an American version. It opened for use in late July 2006 at us.cyworld.com, in beta, with the minihompy renamed the MiniHome and the avatar renamed the MiniMe. TechCrunch covered the launch in tones close to alarm, on the reasonable grounds that the Korean numbers were enormous and MySpace was not obviously safe.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

There was no rise. That is the honest version, and it is worth saying plainly because the retrospectives tend to reach for a cultural explanation that flatters everybody. The usual line is that Americans found it too cute, that the pastel rooms and the cartoon furniture did not read to a teenager in Ohio the way they read to one in Seoul, and there is something in that. Purchasing acorns with cash was not even switched on until a month after launch, so the payment loop that made the product profitable at home was missing from the version that had to prove itself.

But the structural problem was bigger than the styling. The US site and the Korean site were separate systems that could not see each other. Which means the one group in America who already knew what Cyworld was and wanted it, Korean students and Korean immigrants with friends and family back home, signed up and found an empty building. Cyworld sold them a version of the thing they already used, with the one feature that made it worth using removed.

~ the funny part ~

SK Telecom had publicly earmarked something like a hundred and ten million dollars for online business in the United States. Cyworld US was the flagship of that plan and it spent under a tenth of the number before the plan was quietly dropped. The office was closed and the operation moved back to Korea in 2008, more than a year before the site itself went off, which is the corporate equivalent of turning the heating off in a building you have not admitted you are leaving.

At the end, comScore had the US site at roughly 112,000 visitors a month. For scale, that is a mid-sized forum. The shop closed on 3 November 2009 and the rest went on 23 November, and the shutdown notice itself had visible English errors in it, which several people at the time noted was a small fitting detail for a localization effort that had gone through three years without anyone senior reading the English copy.

~ what it became ~

The United States was the first of the foreign editions to close, not the last. Germany and Japan followed by 2010, and Cyworld kept going for a while in China and Vietnam, where the product had actually taken. The home service in Korea lasted until 2015 before Facebook finished it there too, and that death has its own grave on this site.

What Cyworld US is worth remembering for is the lesson everyone had to learn again anyway. Orkut worked in Brazil and nowhere Google intended. Hi5 owned Turkey while doing nothing in America. The network is not the code, and a company that owns nine out of ten teenagers in one country owns exactly zero of them in the next one over unless it can carry the graph across, which nobody has ever managed to do.

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