Daum Yozm

» see yozm.daum.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

150 characters. That was the ceiling Yozm put on a post, and it was not chosen by accident: Me2day had already set 150 as the Korean number, so Daum matched it rather than copying Twitter's 140. Everything about the product was that kind of decision, a local answer to a local competitor while the actual threat was already in the country and growing.

Daum ran a closed beta through 2009 and opened Yozm publicly in February 2010. It had the pieces you would expect from a portal. There was a resharing feature called 소문내기, roughly "spread the word", and there was a set of social games wired directly into the timeline. The games worked. They pulled in the first real wave of users, which is a familiar shape, and like most timelines that fill up with game notifications it did not convert into people talking to each other.

Registrations reached roughly three million. In a country of fifty million with a portal war already running at full volume, three million is a respectable number that means almost nothing, because the people posting were also on Twitter and the people reading were mostly on Twitter only.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the april notice ~

On 12 April 2013 the apps came out of the stores. Three days later ZDNet Korea ran the story with the closure already dated to August, and Daum's line was the standard one: the company had decided to shut Yozm down to focus on core services. Backup tools opened in mid-June and stayed available until 31 December, six months to pull your own posts out, which is more generosity than most shutdowns of that size offered.

The web front end went before the formal date. yozm.daum.net was still serving a full page on 11 June 2013 and was answering with a redirect by 6 July. The official end came on 30 August.

~ the korean bracket ~

Yozm is one of three Korean microblogs that all died inside the same handful of years. Me2day, which set the character limit Yozm copied, was Naver's and went the same way. Cyworld had already been through its own collapse from a different direction. None of them lost to a better Korean product. They lost to an American one that never localized particularly well and did not have to.

Korea was one of the few markets where a domestic social network genuinely beat the imports for a decade, and Yozm is what the end of that run looks like from the inside. A competent product with a fair budget and an established portal behind it lasted three years.

~ how far away this was ~

Reading about Yozm now means reading Korean, because that is the only language anyone wrote it down in. The ZDNet piece and the encyclopedia entry both stay inside one alphabet, and no English-language outlet appears to have covered the shutdown at all. I found the product by running a query against a database of discontinued services.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »