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A look at Asoboo: the international creative network

Out of all of the other social networking sites I’ve had the chance to check out, Asoboo is really cool and underrated. It is beautifully designed, has a friendly community, and smart features.

With the launch of Facebook’s apps platform and gaining such domination of the college scene, Facebook is here to stay and could soon be bigger than Google because of how such tight interconnections between people can impact commerce in so many interesting ways, for instance, through things like targeted ads.

But as I mentioned in a previous article on social networking’s future, despite the natural barriers that exist in creating new sites based around the value of connections, there is an opportunity for niche sites based around some sort of theme to flourish. There is also somewhat of an opportunity for sites in other countries to flourish if Facebook doesn’t build up a network there quickly. And thats just Asoboo is geared towards.

I still don’t know how to speak Japanese outside of the odd word or two, but its something I want to learn more of so I can more comfortably travel the world in the future. French, Russian, and German are some other languages I’d like to eventually pick up. I speak a little French, but not enough to really get survive on my own.

Billing itself as an “International Creative Network, you can tell right off the bat that they’re not bull-shitting you. You can find a language bar in the upper right that changes the language of the main interface from English to Japanese to Chinese to Korean to Spanish. I don’t have any solid statistics in front of me, but anecdotally, a large percentage of the users seem to be based in Japan, which is cool for me because I enjoy learning about that culture. And given that so many videogames and cool animation and comics come from Japan, you just know that they’re a creative people.

Most of Asoboo’s current features are pretty standard fare, but its the implentation of these ideas that stands out, and the implementation always matters more than the idea.

Asoboo allows you to meet people, setup groups, share information on books and movies you love, find recommendations on restaurants and clubs to go to, see what your fans and friends are doing, write and publish a blog, and standard things like that.

The Community

The community seems very friendly and open to strangers and introducing yourself to new people feels easy, and there’s a few cool features that inspire this openness. First of all, the word Asoboo means “Let’s have fun”, which illustrates the character of the site very clearly. This is a fun site.

The last 6 new members are shown on the people page, so you’re sort of encouraged to check out the new peoples’ profiles. Complementing this is the “footsteps” feature which allows you to see who has been checking out your profile. In this sort of community it doesn’t feel creepy at all.

Another thing is that you can tag your profile with interests, and you can find more people that like what you like that way. These types of features are great because any feature that allows you to find people who might share similar interests fulfills the goal of the site.

You can find oddflux’s work at his under-construction website and also a short demo reel at Google Video. I can’t think of a name to call his style, but it feels like its part of a dream.

I’ve been more of a lurker than a contributor thus far at Asoboo because of time constraints, but I have talked to a few people there. One cool person I talked to was a guy nicknamed oddflux, who worked at Dreamworks and other animation studios. We had a delightful short exchange about some of what we do and I got to check out some of his illustration and animation. Thats just what this site is about.

I’ve always been interested learning more about various Asian cultures, particularly Japan’s, so this is great for me.

As mentioned before, much of the community resides in Japan and other Asian countries, which is interesting to me but may not be so interesting to others. Seeing Japanese and English messages together on one page might be difficult for some to read. This is one thing that might prevent Americans and others from deciding to devote much time here.

Design and Layout

The homepage is beautiful. Through an array of images and a small bit of descriptive text, which says “Interesting people, places to go, and things to do.” it very casually illustrates what the site is about. I usually prefer quicker loading homepages without a lot of images for most business sites, but for this type of site where the emphasis is on creativity and socializing, this works very nicely.

All of the pages are beautifully designed. There’s plenty of whitespace, which always screams quality.

The main navigation is beautifully simple. The links are plain text instead of images, which is something I advocate. The navigation words are all nouns, which works well for a users thought process.

One great feature that it has are little built in help menus that tell you what a page actually does, so when initially exploring the site, you should be able to figure out most everything . And then you simply click the hide button when you’re done with the help message and that just disappears. Really nifty and a feature I’d love to incorporate in my sites next time its called for.

There are a few minor design elements that I don’t like, but nothing significant enough to really gripe about so I won’t even mention them. The architects behind this site did a magnificent job. Lots of whitespace, great navigation, beautiful layout. Lovely.

Profile

For the most part, the features here are fairly standard, so I won’t belabor this.

Two uncommon features here are the ability to select which languages you can be contacted in, and the ability to tag your profile with some of your interests. As mentioned before, this facilitates the ability to find members that share your interests, which is great in a social network.

Photos

There’s a very easy to use Flickr image importer (just enter your Flickr name). Thats as it should be. I like the simplicity here a lot.

Blog

You can import an external blog or set it up so that yourusername.asoboo.com is publicly visible and functions as a basic blog.

One limitation is that you can only add one image per post, which prevents it from being used for anything more than very casual blogging. This may have been the designers intent though, so maybe this constraint is designed to point users in the intended direction.

Events

Nobody has yet contributed any events in the closest big city to my house, Philadelphia, so the smaller size of the network prohibits this feature from being too useful to people not living in one of the major urban centers. Tokyo and other big cities have multiple events listed per day though, so thats pretty cool if you happen to live somewhere large.

There’s a decent number of events listed in some larger American cities, so it can be useful for Americans. Still, for many types of event coordination, Facebook is more useful because of the sheer size of the network.

Places

You can contribute short reviews about various restaurants and clubs and things. Again, it is useful if you live near a very big city, but nothing has been contributed near where I live.

Groups

You can form and join simple groups based around a common theme.

For instance, I belong to the Photography group here and some great images are contributed. This isn’t as great as Flickr itself or anything, but it is useful.

Media

Here you can pick various movies, games, books, etc that you like and get comments and discussion going.

Other odds and ends

A few last minute usability and other notes

In preparing this article, while clicking around and trying to get to the media page one more time, I discovered the error screen. Even this is cute and funny, which is always a nice touch. Good writing is very important on the web.

The 404 page is also kind of funny, which I like and is important. It isn’t optimal though. Perhaps a search menu and a couple of popular content options should be placed here to direct a user elsewhere.

Asoboo’s frontpage has a cute little CSS hover effect.

I have more observations and comments, but this already way too long. Check the site out yourself and add me as a friend if you want.

Other interesting comments around the web

Mashable: Asoboo Grows by Staying Private

Asoboo is clearly about quality, and far less concerned about bringing in the masses. Your account must be approved by an Asoboo member before you can interact with the community. This will surely keep the community from outgrowing its purpose, and should definitely deter spammers. All Asoboo members will find their social network far more valuable if Asoboo retains these community restrictions, while others looking for a superficial community won’t find it in Asoboo.

iA: Web 3.0: You say you’re on an infolution? Well, you know…

It’s time that we finally get what we were promised in the beginning: An interactive, social and mainly - simple Internet…

Actually web 2.0 is not really social; mostly it’s just a lot of noise. User generated content as a paradigm is without any doubt a big step for the industry. However, the biggest step is yet to come: To become interactive, social, simple.

Right now, most people are streaming their thoughts, bookmarks, and dreams.
Social, interactive means: People communicate and help develop better products and high value content through communication. Right now, most people are streaming their thoughts, bookmarks, ideas. Yes, forums have been around for years, but there people mostly run in insulting circles and rarely produce something new.

Conclusion

Japan’s biggest social network is reportedly something called Mixi, so its unclear exactly where Asoboo fits in going forward. Mixi might have a great community for all I know, but from these images it doesn’t look nearly as pleasant or welcoming as Asoboo is. This is a fun site. Check it out.

If you’d like to friend me on Asoboo, check out my profile. Thanks.

Posted on August 24th, 2007 by Chris Papadopoulos.

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Comments

1. Joseph (2 comments.) @ Aug 26

   Thanks for the great and thoughtful review! You’re right that most of our traffic (70-80%) is in Japan, including us.

   Joseph

2. Joseph (2 comments.) @ Aug 26

   Also, Mixi is the defacto social network in Japan. I believe they just eclipsed 10 million members, which is nearly all of central Tokyo. By in large, people use Mixi to communicate with people they already now. The look and feel is generic and ugly, but it does have critical mass and work on your phone.

   I can send an invite if you’d like to check it out.

3. Chris Papadopoulos @ Aug 26

   Thanks for the comments Joseph.

   If I was living in Japan and trying to organize a birthday party, I’m sure I’d use Mixi to organize my mass of friends just as I use Facebook to communicate with friends here. For social features to have real value, you need a large network of people on it.

   But its great to have someplace away from your real life friends where you can be a little casual and talk about things that some of your friends may not be interested in. Its nice to have a place where you can let your hair down, take your pants off (figuratively), and focus on what you really love.

   Everything I’ve read about Asoboo suggests that they’re trying to build up quality relationships and discussions more than a sheer quantity of loose connections. So it will be interesting to see if Asoboo places more of an emphasis on developing some kind of feature that provides personal value for creative types (maybe a free art gallery feature or something like that in addition to the Flickr importer) than typical social networking features like groups and events.

   I appreciate the notion of an invite to Mixi, but I don’t speak Japanese except for a few words so I think it would probably be of limited value at the moment.

   

4. Anthony (1 comments.) @ Oct 30

   I agree with your comments regarding asoboo. I go by the name of nycboy on asoboo. Currently as my friends have reminded me I have more friends than anyone on the site but most people are quite sincere in their friendships. The people who are insincere usually don’t last and end up quitting. I have met quite a number of really nice, quality people on asoboo. Of course, people do use asoboo to hookup for intimacy as well but the majority of people are quite sincere.

5. Chris Papadopoulos @ Oct 30

   I’ve only really talked to a few people on Asoboo (a couple of artists and creative types which was cool) but those were some quality interactions. The atmosphere at Asoboo is very calm and friendly.

   I use Facebook for day to day communication with friends, but Asoboo is interesting for meeting other folks I wouldn’t ordinarily get to meet.

   Interesting comment Anthony. Thanks.

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