Mixi
Over the last year or so Mixi has become an unbelievable underground phenomenon. It’s Blog 2.0. It takes blogging to an entirely new level.
It would be wrong to just call it a call blog, for it’s a viral social networking mechanism that takes on a life of it’s own. If you look at my page you’ll see there’s an introduction of who I am, a picture, and then a pictures of (and links to) the people with whom I am connected. They’re my friends in the Mixi-sphere. There’s also a list of the communities of which I am a member and by cross-referencing all of this information you find yourself with a tool that connects you to hundreds of thousands of people all over Japan (and even the world) with amazing precision. Say I want to meet (in either the virtual or real sense) a fellow early-thirties, MTB freak who likes jazz and who is either blood type A or type O and female (or any combination of factors) then this can be accomplished in seconds. This is how the communities are built in Mixi-land.
“Do you Mixi?” has entered the vernacular and is as common and innocent as “What’s your email address?”.
Mixi also has built in diaries (but it integrates well with RSS-based blogs) a message-system, and so much more. And it’s all free.
If you can understand Japanese then you definitely owe it to yourself to sign up, and be part of the revolution.
Information wants to be free.