Yozm

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2010 I was twenty-six and, seen from Turkey, the microblog argument had exactly one participant in it. Twitter had won so thoroughly outside a short list of countries that most people never found out there had been a fight at all. Korea was on that short list, and it kept the fight going for three more years with services almost nobody outside the peninsula could name.

Yozm was Daum's entry. Daum was the second largest internet company in the country, the one that was not Naver, and it opened Yozm in february 2010. The name comes from 요즘, which means something close to "these days". The product was a 150-character message box with social gaming functions attached at launch, and if you have used Twitter you have seen the whole interface already.

It reached roughly three million users. By any ordinary standard that is not a failure. Twitter inside Korea in the same period was estimated at about 6.4 million, so Yozm was running at half the scale of the global winner on its home ground. What it never found was a reason to exist for anybody who had already registered somewhere else and brought their friends along.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The Korean internet in 2010 was not a smaller copy of the American one. It had built a complete social stack years earlier and mostly on its own terms, with Cyworld doing the profile-and-friend-list thing before Facebook was written. So when microblogging showed up, the domestic portals did not treat it as a foreign format to be licensed. Each of the big ones built their own. Naver's was me2day, which had the strongest run of any of them. Daum's was Yozm.

The problem with several domestic microblogs in a country of fifty million people is that a microblog is worth exactly what the number of interesting people posting on it is worth. Splitting that pool four ways, with Twitter taking a slice as well, made it close to impossible for any of them to reach the density where the habit becomes compulsive. Korean users ended up checking more than one, which is what somebody does when they have not found the right one yet.

~ what got buried with it ~

Daum pulled the app on 12 april 2013 and put the closure notice up at the end of that month. The stated reason was a decision to refocus on core businesses, which for once was a description rather than a euphemism. The service ended in august, and users had until december to export whatever they had written.

Naver killed me2day the following june, so inside a year the entire Korean domestic microblog experiment was finished. Daum merged with Kakao in 2014 and the Daum name has been shrinking ever since. What is actually gone is three years of Korean short-form posting that was never scraped into anybody's training corpus and mostly did not survive the backup window. Nobody outside the country ever read a line of it, and now nobody inside it can either.

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