Welcome to my MiniHompy: Korea's Cyworld Community

Imagine one third of your country's population online. Now, imagine them all designing and endlessly redecorating their own personal online space (a virtual room) to make their home page more inviting and appealing to visitors. Imagine all these people existing within this online community as a person, a dog or maybe even a pie. Welcome to South Korea's Cyworld*, an extraordinary online phenomenon.

Cyworld is a web-based online community/social networking system that has its own currency, and, in part, consists of small virtual rooms (Minirooms) where your personal avatar lives. You can spend some Cyworld currency (known as acorns) to redecorate your Miniroom how you like and invite online friends over to visit. MySpace and Friendster are other such online systems, but for me these pale in comparison to Cyworld's sense of immersive, interactive, creative fun. Who could resist an invitation to visit a friend's recently redesigned 'cyber room', housed on one's own 'MiniHompy' (or mini home page)? This room may also be complete with a mix of your favourite top 40 hits on the Miniroom's audio.

*Note: Cyworld doesn't work happily in Firefox. Safari (Mac) and Explorer (PC) work best. Scroll down to 'Best Hit' at bottom to see an ever-changing display of the popular MiniHompys (not all of which have Minirooms).

Currently Cyworld has around 18 million residents and daily visitors – more than a third of the population of South Korea. That's almost the entire population of Australia. In fact, Cyworld commands an audience of 90% of the Korean population under 20. It has also just been launched in the US and is in China, Japan, Taiwan and Germany is next. In Germany, Cyworld will be partnering with Deutsche Telekom.

Cyworld's inhabitants are constantly redecorating their virtual rooms with all sorts of floor coverings, wall coverings and paintings – even a pixelly Mona Lisa and electronic Minihompy entertainment devices. You can even plant a lush field of grass and throw in a few rainbows for good measure. And – by spending a few extra acorns you can provide a favourite pop tune for your Minihompy visitors to listen to. You can't actually download this to your own hard drive for your own listening pleasure – but you can pay'n play within the confines of your Minihompy. You can also access Cyworld via your mobile phone.

Korea's SK Group owns Cyworld. The SK Group is one of Korea's largest chaebol, that is, business conglomerates (like Hyundai, Samsung and LG), and earns (according to Wikipedia) an estimated 290 million Korean Won ($US300,000) a day from Cyworld. That's some serious acorns. Sites get ranked on Cyworld according to their number of visitors. They also get scored according to their 'friendliness' and 'sexiness'. In order to make one's MiniHompy 'sexy' and 'friendly', much Korean Won is spent obtaining the aforementioned acorns and purchasing inviting Miniroom furnishings. If you're not busily designing and tweaking your space, you're visiting an online friend's MiniHompy and checking out their online pad. And again - you might use a dog, a cat, a humanoid or some weird little starfish thingy as your online avatar. Hey - don't stand on the (virtual) sofa whilst eating those (animated) noodles!

Each MiniHompy can contain not only a MiniRoom but a message/bulletin board, photo gallery and guestbook where you can leave a message regarding your impression of the 'friendliness' and 'sexiness' of that particular Minihompy. 

But it's the idea that (in South Korea alone) 18 million people are busily immersed in designing and redesigning their own personal online space, and visiting the online spaces of others that is truly flabbergasting. This is no mere Changing Rooms or Backyard Blitz aimed at a relatively passive audience of TV viewers hunkered down on the couch for a night of prime-time DIY entertainment. Cyworld is a creative, engaging, diverse and wonderfully goofy cultural phenomenon. It's far from passive and all of it is about building community and friendships. And much of it is also about design. And acorns.

Some examples of Korean Cyworld minirooms (© all individual MiniHompy owners):

Links:

The new US Cyworld site
BBC
CNN Money
GigaOm
Wikipedia on Cyworld