What can MIXI do for you?

Mixi is a social networking community site operating in Japanese language in Japan.  Its name "MIXI" is coined to denote "mix" +"I" according to the corporate press release.

MEMBERSHIP BY INVITATION: Its feature pretty much resembles orkut.com in that the membership is by invitation only, thereby felicitating discussion by personal page, diary, or shared interest community and fostering peer-to-peer friendships along the way.  Because each member is forced to be identified to some extent by the system, she or he can remain less anonymous.  Those age under 18 are not allowed to register.  It might be considered more secure than other community sites such as mySpace or the conventional blogosphere (on the surface, at least).  However I think it is ultimately participant's responsibility to secure her or himself inside (and outside) the MIXI, as chartreuse (beta) characterizes mySpace as a modern bike.

MAIMIKU:  myMIXI, or MAIMIKU for short (well it gets short when spelled out in katakana) means buddy or friend.  Similer to contact in flickr but Maimiku involves approval process. Notify the friendship each other and upon endorsement, self-uploaded picture (those images expressing the self) will appear in respective facebook of each personal page.

When you are first invited by someone, you are registered as her or his MYMIKU, that at the same time means she or he becomes your first MAIMIKU.  You might grow your MAIMIKU list over time.  In case your MAIMIKU gets zero for a certain period of time, you will be asked to leave MIXI.  In other words, you are not supposed to be all alone by yourself inside MIXI any longer.

Note the maximum possible number of Maimiku you are allowed to have is 1,000.

ASHIATO (footprint): I particularly like Ashiato feature, which is the trace / footprint automatically left  in the Ashiato (footprint) log whenever someone visits one's personal page of MIXI, which makes it easier to initiate the conversation.  Very often a MIXI user names one of the diary posts as Ashiato Cho (Guestbook), which is sorely dedicated to a visitor and allows her or him to drop a word or two especially for the first visit.  Thanks to that, my MAIMIKU (myMIXI) list now grows to 80.  In addition, I think the psychological distance among members more close and the conversation more deep inside MIXI than those taking place outside (blogosphere). Another way of saying it is that Japanese are, in general, more shy to speak up in the blogosphere, but not so shy inside MIXI.  Someone even attributes the success of MIXI relative to its competitior GREE to this Ashiato feature (in Japanese).

If you are already a mixi member, Creating Ashiato Cho and Checking Ashiato the turotial I prepared might be helpful. 

COMMUNITIES:  There are 538,937 communities as of March 2006.  In the next module, I have listed the communities which I thought particularly interest those non-native Japanese speakers.  Also, the popular communites are listed in the module that follows. 

HOW BIG IS IT?: For what it's worth, its current membership is 2,895,360 as of January 2006, increased by about 6 times over a year.  

In terms of subscription base, it is equivalent of about 29% of Yomiuri or about 35% of Asahi, the two of Japan's largest newspapers.  According to the company press release, about 70% are still active (but it does not disclose the duration that acitivity rate is measured. Also refer.

WANT TO BE A MEMBER?: To become a member, you must be over 18 (you can cheat by the way) and would need an invitation from an existing member.  Note: Now they require you to have a valid email account from one of those Japanese mobile carriers such as docomo, au, and softbank before sign up; this literally means you have to apply for the mobile phone in Japan (that is present your ID card at one of those stores in Japan. For more, please read mixi account set up.) In addition, you'd need the basic level of reading/writing Japanese language skills and a PC (or a MAC) with Japanese language processing capabilities. 

OPERATIONS GUIDE: Set up an account.