Shrug. Social networks come and go, rise and fall depending upon where the single 20-year-old girls hang. Then those girls age, get married, and have children, and another service takes its place.<p>How many "culture changing" social networks have we had since computers got networked? I have to use more fingers than on both hands.
Note also that LINE routinely censors the communications of its users in China:<p><a href="https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regionally-based-keyword-censorship-line/" rel="nofollow">https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regi...</a><p>(And it's still going on: <a href="https://citizenlab.org/2014/10/asia-chats-line-keyword-filtering-upgraded-include-regular-expressions/" rel="nofollow">https://citizenlab.org/2014/10/asia-chats-line-keyword-filte...</a> )<p>Perhaps it's just the cost of doing business in China (Skype used to do the same thing, though I believe they've stopped since being bought by Microsoft), but it seems pretty scummy.
wow I moved to Japan in April 2011 and cannot believe that line was introduced in June 2011. It was nearly ubiquitous among people my age roughly 20-30 and I can't even remember not having it. I have never been into emoticons or emoji, but I am not ashamed to say I probably spent a few thousand Yen on stickers and would probably do it again.<p>Stickers were a great way to converse with friends whose English was not strong. Things like sarcasm and a lot of American humor does not translate well and stickers were a great medium.<p>I have moved on from Japan but I still use it all the time to keep up with friends back there. I think the user experience is stronger than whatsapp and facebook messenger.
The hold Line has over Japan, and KakaoTalk over Korea, is pretty concerning to me. Entire countries are now off-limits to open platforms again -- a system that doesn't woo the host companies into writing a client for it is legitimately not useful for anyone there who has a social life (or increasingly even social responsibilities, like getting notifications from their school).
I'm visiting Japan quite often and made some Japanese friends.
Line is quite popular, partly because you can exchange IDs instead of phonenumbers and the stickers. You can see that Japanese people value privacy if you log in to their PC client => all data on your phone is wiped, which is a bit unconvienent for me.<p>I think it's funny how every other app now copies the line stickers. Facebook does it too, but I'm not sure if it's really catching on here. Japan really likes cute stuff and since the language is a lot more polite and indirect it's probably easier to communicate with stickers.<p>Line is much better than WeChat tough, which has bad layout, low quality emoticons and doesn't feel native.<p>WeChat's feature for finding users closeby who opt-in
is great. Please check that out, if you are an app developer!<p>I like Viber more, because their client works everywhere, actual voice calling is included, the software is fast and nice and they have great support, no battery drain like skype.
LINE is probably one of the big IM players in Indonesia as well aside from BBM (decreasing as users moving towards Android based phones) and WhatsApp.<p>That's a country with lots of users as well.<p>I rarely use Line except whenever I need to chat with my family/friends overseas but when it comes to IM, culture seems to dictate the user-experience. I use Google Hangout, Facebook Messenger, and Line.<p>Google Hangout and Facebook Messenger are alike and focus on one thing: conversation (sounds heavy eh?). Line focuses on expression/emotion (especially 'cuteness').
When I moved to another country from Japan, I couldn't carry over my account (which is associated with my e-mail).<p>Their customer support simply doesn't exist (yes, seriously), so I had to kiss goodbye to that account.<p>It looks cute (although I'm not sure it matches the taste of people from non-Asian cultures, and I don't think western people will be eager to buy or even use the stickers etc.), and everyone in Japan is using it. Given all these, it's going to be a tough for them to get into the market.<p>(and oh, the name is terrible in google search)
If Telegram finds a way to open source their backend, then that could be a way for new chat apps to compete against Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and so on. The security issues of Telegram would need to be sorted out first off course. Both Telegram and WhatsApp uses phone numbers to identify users, so they could probably let users talk to each other, if they wanted to.
S Korea is usually best known for hardware products and not software/online products but they do have some innovative online sites.<p>Examples
cyworld. Founded in 1999.<p>naver.com. Largest search engine in Korea. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/05online.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/05online.html?_...</a>