Google Open Social meets Cyworld
Last Friday, I took a day off and attended Dev.Square seminar by SK Communication.
Dev.Square is a open source development environment which Cyworld (Korea's largest social network service) provides for the developers. It's powered by Google App Engine and OpenSocial.
I've attended the App Engine / Open Social seminar on 25th February this year also. Mickey Kim and Chris Schalk from Google were speakers back then, and they came this time as well. Mickey was trying to make contract with Cyworld since then, and it finally came to end with a great result.
All the people from Cyworld, Google, and we developers were all very excited about the synergy between world's biggest internet company and Korea's largest social network company. People were very passionate, so we talked and discussed a lot.
In my opinion, Korean people are not very familiar with the open social, or social network. Cyworld is a huge social network site, but the system in it is pretty exclusive. So I think Cyworld's decision this time was very meaningful and important. And it's very good chance for Korean web environment to leap one step forward.
Cyworld has very powerful point to attract developers. It's the virtual currency system. Cyworld has it's own virtual money called "Dotori" and Korean people are very familiar to the concept. And they're buying it a lot already. So if developers make good apps and success, they can get the reward enough by Dotori.
As one of the speakers said, it's the start, not the end. We can make a great fertile playground for ourselves, developers and designers.
