Nocchi is great.

Yahoo Japan recently released a new business SNS in Japan called Yahoo CU.  Given that previous attempts by other companies to launch a successful business SNS in Japan have failed, a lot of attention is going to Yahoo’s attempt at the business social networking market.  There are other business SNSs such as BizPal, bizzo and SBI, not to mention Linkedin.com that entered Japan in 2007 but has yet to release their Japanese version.  Of these, SBI appears to be the most successful with a reported a user base of 70,000 but that is still only very small portion of the potential market.  It will be exciting to see how Yahoo Japan will do in this area given that they are a huge powerhouse in Japan.

Part of the problem that makes business SNS difficult is that Japanese people are more conscious about their privacy and prefer to remain anonymous.  I’m going to keep the issue of anonymity and Japanese web culture outside the scope of this post but CU is appearently requiring all users to use their real name (part of the validation).

Currently, service is by invite only and unfortunately, I have yet to secure an invite.  For this reason, I can’t really confirm any of the reports and I’m basing this post on things that I have read either on forums, blogs or news reports.  Does anyone have an invite? Update: I got my invite!

The other interesting thing about CU is that shortly after the launch of CU, a few people reported system related issues.  I would assume that Yahoo developed their own platform but according to some web forums, they customized the popular open source community software, OpenPNE and this choice of platform has been partially blamed for the problems  I haven’t seen CU so can’t say if it is true that Yahoo used OpenPNE but I can say that I’ve never been a big fan of OpenPNE because it is a copy of Mixi’s platform.

Some issues and problems, as reported in けんすう’s experience with CU were:

• Avatar pictures are not resized.  So if you upload a photo that is 1200 x 800 pixels, the system never resizes this and displays it as the original size.  This is obvious a problem because it breaks the page layout.
• Username and Community names have no length limit nor are they trimmed or truncated upon display.  This again is a problem because users can create communities that have 1000 characters in their title field.

I’m sure yahoo will clean up these issues pretty quickly but I did find these reports a surprise.  I can’t wait to check it out myself.