Cyworld

The rest of the world uses Facebook, but Korea uses Cyworld.

What is it? Well, it’s a social networking site that’s similar to Myspace but more self-contained. Like Myspace, anyone can visit your site provided they know your ID. If you don’t like total strangers gawking at your stuff you can restrict certain areas to “friends-only”.

Unlike other social networking sites, you can’t speak to anyone from different networks. There are Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and American Cyworlds, but they can’t talk to each other. You have to sign up for each one if you wish to converse with your international friends.

If you want to make many Korean friends, or keep in touch with them, you have to sign up. The entire process is in Korean, and it’s a pain to do if you can’t understand it. If you have patience, and you can read Korean (and have a handy dictionary), the going will still be painfully slow, but with a little perseverance, you can do it. The creators make it a big pain for actual foreigners to sign up, and you will be required to provide them with a scan of your Alien Registration card, and other documents that you may be uncomfortable with doling out.

Once they have confirmed your request to sign-up and given you leave to do so, you can start adding relevant info to your profile.

It took me several days to get mine up and running, a task that was basically accomplished by yours truly. My site sits at http://www.cyworld.com/scroozle. You will have to allow pop-ups , as your cyworld mini-home (미니홈피) is a pop-up. You may want to set your browser to accept Korean characters as well, so it doesn’t look like gibberish.

That’s a screenshot of mine. Most Koreans like their site to have English navigational buttons, as they’re more trendy. But as I am 외국인 (non-Korean), 한글-lettering is fine by me. It also impresses your Korean friends!

My set-up is basically the default look. You can change the backgrounds and colours as you see fit. The tabs on the right (the blue ones) are your navigational buttons.

Tab one is the homepage. Your profile pic is on the left, and under it is your info (birthdate, sex, e-mail). Any updates and changes are recorded at the top. The blank box in the center is for various things. You can personalise it as you wish. Friends can leave little comments at the bottom (not in the screen shot).

Tab two is your profile info. You can write your biography here. I kept pertinent info that Koreans wish to know. Name, job, where I am from, contact stuff, and the fact that I am totally single (they’ll always ask if you have a significant other).

Tab three is your diary (or blog). I sometimes write funny little things my Korean friends will enjoy, or stuff they don’t know about me. As you can see, it hates English words and will indiscriminately break them up as each line runs out of room.

The next tab is your photo collection. You can only have 40 albums, but you can put as many pics in each as you want. It also gives you various editing tools to employ as you wish. I find the photo-uploading service to be frustratingly slow compared to Facebook’s bulk uploader. By the way, Lily took that pic while we were camping. It was late at night.

Next, you have your “Wall”, just like in Facebook. Friends can leave you messages as they wish. Messages can be made public or private (here, I censored my friend’s name). Private messages cannot be seen by other people. Unlike Facebook, you don’t necessarily have to be friends to post messages (I have posted on strangers’ walls by accident).

The final tab is one that allows you to edit everything. It’s your tools tab.

When Koreans aren’t using Cyworld, they use Nate On. Nate On is the same as Windows Live Messenger. It looks like this:

The little house icons by each name are the Cyworld mini-homes. “N” signifies new updates. The gibberish letters are the result of Nate On hating my computer. Something that occurs regularly with certain JAVA apps.

Conversation windows look like:

Now, you know how to communicate with your Korean friends, if you are unable to persuade them to join Facebook!

If they do sign up for Facebook, prepare to hear a lot about how difficult it is to use, and how much Cyworld is better. I just remind them I signed up for both, so they should quit their yammering.