SeanChoe : blog

social media, movies and technologies

Great time at Twitter / SNS forum

These days there were many Twitter real-life meet ups in Korea. The number of Twitter users in Korea is increasing fast and they are very eager to get together in person apparently.

Last Saturday (9/5) There was also a Twitter & SNS forum at Hangyang university. I've attended there too. (as you can guess) This forum has been organized by a few people on Twitter including the famous news anchor Kim Ju Ha.

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In the forum a number of speakers had made their speech. Most of them were pretty helpful. What I was specially impressed was that a pastor joined the forum as a audience and he made a small speech about current situation of the Korean IT and broadcasting field. I think it's very nice phenomenon that religious ministers are being interested in new technologies and social networks.

The most exciting part of the forum this time was the unofficial afterward party. I stayed at the place and talked with another people after the forum, so that I could join the small party at a pork meat restaurant. And I had so unique opportunity that I could talk to Kim Ju Ha anchor face to face at the table! :)

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Me and Kim Ju Ha anchor

I also met so many great people in the forum. I realized again that the most important thing is always people. Hopely they will be my power in the future.

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.