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Cascading Behavior in Networks of Internet in Korea: Galapagos Syndrome of Internet in Korea

Korea used to be the innovative country in terms of developing many new internet services. Even though its size and population are very small compared to that of Japan and China in northeast Asia, its broadband infrastructure is so good that many internet services preceded any other countries’. For example, one of the famous social network services, which is called “Cyworld”, was developled in 1999, which preceded “Facebook” for 5 years. Cyworld is a platform to connect people in the cyber-space through avatars, and this innovative form of social network service was spread quickly on the country. More than 90% of internet users in Korea were active on there until Cyworld was beaten by Facebook. Moreover, in 2002, the web portal called Naver, which is the most popular web search engine in Korea, launched Q&A service, and it preceded Yahoo Answer for 3 years.

One article analyzed the battle between Facebook and Cywolrd in Korea. It took Facebook a very long time to win Cyworld. Facebook users reached 500 million in 2011, and the world was obsessed with Facebook. However, in Korea, Cyworld had the tipping point that 25million people had Cyworld account in 2011 which is the half of the population of the Korea. It should be hard for Facebook to take over Korea because the network of internet system in Korea is acting like a cluster that blocks the spread of Facebook cascades. Since there were so many people using Cyworld in their network, it took many years to overcome the threshold to change to using Facebook. However, finally, the user of Facebook exceeded the user of Cyworld in 2012. This is because the explosion of Facebook in the whole Asia-Pacific area and the huge growth of smartphone users who seek the comfortable platforms. Cyworld did not actually improve their platforms as they settled for the current share.

Nowadays, many global internet platforms have hard time in penetrating the Korea, and Korea is not the innovating country in developing internet services anymore. Korea is too slow to adapt the global trend in new technology so that they are behind in trends. Therefore they cannot lead the global trend in contrast to the situation which they lead the platforms in early 2000’s. Without openness to global features and innovative thinking, Korea cannot lead the world’s internet technology trends and they will be isolated with their unchangeable and outdated own internet culture like the Galapagos Finch.

 

Articles:

http://blog.btrax.com/en/2012/09/11/korean-internet-trend/

http://blog.mozilla.org/gen/2010/01/07/tedx-seoul-korea-internet-galapagos/

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