Chris Barr directed me to PingMag where I read up on Web 2.0 in Japan. As you’d expect, it’s mighty pretty and there are some interesting comparisons to the web services in Japan and the United States :
Japan is a country renowned for it’s technological prowess – being on the cutting edge of robotics, hybrid car research, video game entertainment and countless other areas. Strange then, that whilst the rest of the world has seen a huge boom in “Web 2.0″ style services on the Internet over the past 12 months, Japan has been somewhat lagging behind. Fear not, however, as Japan is slowly catching up. Here is a quick look at some of the Web 2.0 goodness coming out of Japan and a look at their Western equivalents.
Among the spaces discussed, PingMag compares Social Networking (Myspace, Facebook, Blogger vs. Mixi, GREE), Video Sharing (YouTube vs. hatenatube), Podcasting (Podcast Alley, Odeo vs. ZapZap), Productivity (Ta-da Lists, Orchestrate vs. Checkpad), Start Pages (Netvibes vs. StartForce), Blog Tracking (Technorati vs. Kizasi) and finally, Industry News (TechCrunch, Digg vs. 100shiki, Hatena Bookmarks). Of all the services mentioned, Kizasi seems interesting to me since it’s like technorati + TechMeme combined. Lots of tasty Japanese screenshots after the jump.
