Uberme, a Myspace-like blogging/social networking service from Samsung Mobile, has launched. Featurewise, it’s got the whole pakcage; videos, photos, blogs, groups, etc. But the key differentiator of Uberme might be its focus on mobile: Uberme aims to provide as good an user experience on mobile phones as on the online.
And interestingly:
All in all, the service looks similar to Myspace and Bebo. But then, none of the big name social network services of the US have established a very strong foothold in the Asian market, perhaps except for Windows Live Spaces. This gives Uberme a chance to become a big player in Asia.
There’s a reason why Myspace and Bebo aren’t big in Asia, and it’s certainly not for the lack of trying. IMHO, it’s because there’s no way to provide a generic social-networking service for such a heterogenous region. Much love to Samsung and all, but when your audience is fragmented into at least 5 major language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and English) it’s unlikely they will all ever be able to interact. And to do language-based segregation (ala Wikipedia.org) is only solving part of the problem. The main issue, in my mind, is that you can’t ever just do a direct translation if you really want to connect with your audience. There are too many language nuances that you have to eschew in favor of portability, and you lose the distinctive local flavor that you would have otherwise achieved had you focused on a smaller target.
Granted, services like Friendster have done reasonably well in Asia (at least, in the Philippines) although I believe that that was more due to the fact that there were no compelling alternatives out there at the time. Of course, when enough Filipinos had jumped onto Friendster, there was no turning back — it was standard Tipping-Point-type stuff.
Fast forward to now, and Samsung has a tough journey ahead of them. They have to somehow reconcile the multi-cultural tastes of a vast Asian market and still provide an experience that is Myspace-but-better. Perhaps using a Germanic word as the name of this Asian Myspace-killer wasn’t the best idea though, I don’t know.
(This article was originally published on http://blog.syndeomedia.com)