Mixi is a social networking community site operating in Japanese language in Japan. Its feature pretty much resembles orkut.com in that the membership is by invitation only and it thereby felicitates discussion by diary or interest community and peer-to-peer friendships along the way. Because each member is forced to be identified to some extent by the system, she or he can remain less anonymous and hence is put in more secured environments than conventional internet world or blogging. I particularly like “Ashiato” 足跡 function, which is the trace automatically notified in the log whenever someone visits my personal page within MIXI, which makes it easy to initiate discussion. Thanks to that, my MY MIXI (or, “MAIMIKU” for short in Japanese, the equivalent of “add me as a friend†in orkut) now grows to 13. Bacause of that nature, I feel the psychological distance among members more close and the conversation more deep inside MIXI than those taking place outside (blogging).
For what it’s worth, its current membership is 2,895,360. In terms of subscription base, it is equivalent of about 29% of Yomiuri or about 35% of Asahi, the two of Japan’s largest newspapers.
Update: This is part I of the same topic in Japanese. Here is a lens called “What can mixi do for you?” at squidoo.
technorati tags mixi orkut　ミクシィ squidoo maimiku ashiato