me2day

» see me2day.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard of me2day was years after the platform had already closed, when a paper on korean social-media migration patterns mentioned it in passing as the local twitter competitor that lost. by then the audience had been absorbed into kakaotalk and line. i never had a korean keyboard layout installed and i was not following kpop in 2010, so me2day's run from 2007 through 2014 had no surface i could touch from ankara.

the service launched in february 2007 as an independent product, then got acquired by nhn corporation a couple of years in. nhn, which would rebrand itself naver in 2013, was already the dominant korean web portal, and me2day became its microblogging arm. the feature set was twitter-shaped, with short text posts and replies, but with korean ui conventions that made the experience feel native rather than a translation. the platform leaned heavily teenage, and naver promoted it to that audience hard through 2010 and 2011.

what gave me2day its actual cultural weight was the k-pop celebrity adoption. big bang and 2ne1 ran me2day accounts where fans could read short updates from their idols in korean without the global twitter feed in the way. wonder girls and shinee did the same. for a window of maybe two years me2day was where korean fandom lived. then twitter itself caught on inside korea, and naver shifted its own microblog energy toward band. me2day became a maintenance product. on november 28, 2013 naver emailed every user the closure notice. the servers went off on june 30, 2014.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the design choice that mattered was the korean ui. twitter's character limit treated all languages the same way and that did not make sense for korean, where two syllables can carry a sentence's worth of meaning. me2day's interface and notification model were built around the korean web's existing patterns rather than translated from san francisco.

the celebrity adoption was the marketing engine. naver had relationships with the major entertainment agencies and could broker exclusive me2day accounts for the big idol groups. for a teenage fan in seoul, that was the entire pitch. there were celebrity tweets in english on twitter and there were celebrity me2day posts in korean on me2day. one of those was the actual home.

~ what got buried with it ~

when naver pulled the plug, the company offered an export tool but did not migrate accounts anywhere. years of fan-to-idol short-form korean chatter went dark. there is no archive. the kpop history of 2010 through 2013 has a hole shaped exactly like me2day. the major idol groups moved their announcements to twitter and later to weverse, and the me2day posts they had written stayed inside the service until the service stopped.

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