 | Trying out CyWorldAugust 13th, 2006 |
So I went and made a Minihome on Cyworld’s US beta to try it out. You can visit it at http://us.cyworld.com/raph if you like.
A few observations:
They certainly have the microtransaction thing down. I was able to blow through my allotted 50 free acorns in no time at all, without hardly furnishing my minihome at all.
They have a lot of avatar customization stuff to add. I can’t get a beard, I can’t get glasses unless they are sunglasses… most of the clothes are of course for girls, as are most of the pieces of decor; lots of pinks and hearts and other “cute” styles. My minime doesn’t look like me at all — he looks like a member of a boy band. Then again, browsing through the male profiles on there, that’s what most of the actual males using the service seem to want to look like. 
The “worldness” of the minihomes has a ways to go to feel like more than a static backdrop you can arrange; it’s a far cry from Gaia Online, for example. However, it does immediately tap into the “virtual housing” feeling that you get from player housing in an MMO: that compulsion to arrange, buy, and personalize.
It opens a lot of windows, and they seem to pile up over time. Not sure how I managed that. Also the usual beta glitches, but nothing too horrible.
There are already 769 “clubs” created. The largest categories are Fan Clubs, Music, Entertainment, and Schools & Alumni. Most of the clubs are small yet. The Reality TV club is featured right on the front page of Clubs, but there’s no Rock Star subgroup. There’s lots of pictures of dresses from Project Runway, however.
Hitting random minihomes gave me a disproportionate number of Asian kids — most likely because they know of Cyworld from its popularity in Asia (some stats if you’re not familiar with the phenomenon).
On the face of it, this is far slicker than MySpace, but we’ll have to watch and see how the microtransaction aspect does here. To some degree, Gaia may have stolen its thunder, and Gaia’s up to 4.4m registered users already.
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