How Japan's Line app became a culture-changing, revenue-generating phenomenon | Hacker News Reader

How Japan's Line app became a culture-changing, revenue-generating phenomenon

fastcompany.com

84 pointstechnologizer41 comments

Shrug. Social networks come and go, rise and fall depending upon where the single 20-year-old girls hang. Then those girls age, get married, and have children, and another service takes its place.

How many "culture changing" social networks have we had since computers got networked? I have to use more fingers than on both hands.

> I have to use more fingers than on both hands.

If you're counting in decimal... Counting in binary should get us close to the limit case.

hehe good one.

for people that need more info on the joke. You can count with one hand to 31 in binary and to 1023 using both hands.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary

That's not due to counting "in decimal", it's because of counting in unary: using the number of fingers to represent a number (possible to count from 0 to 10, inclusive), rather than having each finger represent a digit in a number (possible to count from 0 to 1,023 inclusive, in binary).

This was hilarious to write if you're into puns, since the collision between "digit" as in "part of hand" and "part of number" hit me in the face.

oh man, totally out-nerded on HN whoda thunk?

;)

If you've got particularly dexterous fingers you could probably count in Ternary and get to 59048, much higher than binary's 1023

Ephemerality of a phenomenon does not mean ephemerality of it's effects. Just because LINE might be gone 5 years from now, does not mean all cultural change it might have brought around will just revert.

> Just because LINE might be gone 5 years from now, does not mean all cultural change it might have brought around will just revert.

But it has to cause cultural change first. What's the cultural change? How is this different from "Hello Kitty"?

Breakdown of numbers: https://www.techinasia.com/line-releases-regional-breakdowns...

Only profitable market looks to be Japan. 90% of its users are in non-profitable markets.

Good marketing on their part though.

Note also that LINE routinely censors the communications of its users in China:

https://citizenlab.org/2013/11/asia-chats-investigating-regi...

(And it's still going on: https://citizenlab.org/2014/10/asia-chats-line-keyword-filte... )

Perhaps it's just the cost of doing business in China (Skype used to do the same thing, though I believe they've stopped since being bought by Microsoft), but it seems pretty scummy.

It IS the cost of doing business in China, and the main reason why Google is left out. Facebook is left out of China in a mix between censorship and protectionism.

Skype serves a completely different executable in China in order to circumvent their own encryption.

Does Skype still do this? I know they used to -- the Chinese version was TOM-Skype -- but last I checked TOM no longer distributes a version of Skype. http://skype.tom.com/ redirects you to get something called Zoom messenger instead.

If the Chinese are making mistakes on who they are silencing, there is nothing to suggest the west isn't making as many mistakes in who they are allowing to speak. As far as I can tell no one at Twitter or Facebook et al, is measuring how much the platform has been used to spread ignorance and terror.

The media (mainstream and social) have as much capacity to spread hate as to do good. Anytime there is a difference of opinion, there are people waiting to take advantage of that difference for their own purposes. And the media (mainstream and social) have not only provided a platform for these lunatics, they have profited handsomely from it.

If the Chinese are hypocrites so are we. Nobody is counting the number of families that have been affected by ISIS or destabilized dictatorships in the middle east.

I have no idea how to parse this. Is it just another "china does bad but so do we so it is ok" rant? How are China's mistakes related to the west's at all? You are comparing developing world to developed world problems, which are fairly incomparable.

Just saying we have as much to learn from them, as they from us. It's not productive to look at their censorship tools as one dimensional attacks on freedom of speech. Both sides are programmed to look at the issue (of censorship) differently, while in fact they are trying to solve the same problems.

When China is attempting censorship of mainstream and social media, they do so with the specific goal of preventing sudden/unpredictable destabilizing scenarios i.e. they are proactive. This has well known costs which gets quite a bit of publicity in the West.

The West on the other hand while "protecting freedom of speech" is forced into being reactive (https://twitter.com/nytimes/statuses/567805738173886464 + see Twitter CEO's comment about the failure to deal with online abuse\hate) There is a massive cost\consequence to being reactive i.e. ISIS\Charlie Hedbo etc that keeps accruing. When a family gets displaced from their home in Iraq or Syria, directly or indirectly, thanks to ISIS recruitment on Twitter or some clip on YouTube, currently, there isn't any serious pressure on companies or governments in the West to take responsibility. Everyone is programmed\biased to "protect freedom of speech" as a default position. There needs to be more pressure. Censorship and reducing anonymity shouldn't be treated as holy cows, that CEO's and Govt officials are afraid to publicly talk about.

Complicated story apologies if I am being overly brief.

wow I moved to Japan in April 2011 and cannot believe that line was introduced in June 2011. It was nearly ubiquitous among people my age roughly 20-30 and I can't even remember not having it. I have never been into emoticons or emoji, but I am not ashamed to say I probably spent a few thousand Yen on stickers and would probably do it again.

Stickers were a great way to converse with friends whose English was not strong. Things like sarcasm and a lot of American humor does not translate well and stickers were a great medium.

I have moved on from Japan but I still use it all the time to keep up with friends back there. I think the user experience is stronger than whatsapp and facebook messenger.

+1 better experience than Whatsapp, whether we like it or not, emoji do make sense, even though they'll probably never be as hugely used as in Japan.

This might not be the right place but I'd like to mention that for me, Line works less reliably than Whatsapp on Android. Line fails to deliver any messages unless I explicitly open the app. Plus as an aside, do we have any information on how secure Line is?

Security is hard; let's sell stickers.

It might be unencrypted http for all the target audience cares about. 20-30s youngsters using it to bat emoticons back and forth and discussing the merits of frills versus lace is probably a lot more concerned with how cute the stickers are versus how likely an adversarial party would high-jack a session cookie. On the other hand, if the girls and boys using Line are using it to negotiate drug deals, secret assassination plans, or naked selfies, security might be more important.

The hold Line has over Japan, and KakaoTalk over Korea, is pretty concerning to me. Entire countries are now off-limits to open platforms again -- a system that doesn't woo the host companies into writing a client for it is legitimately not useful for anyone there who has a social life (or increasingly even social responsibilities, like getting notifications from their school).

Then again, it's perhaps nice to have even a little bit of diversity between countries.

Line has a huge stronghold in Thailand as well. Not so much in Singapore where Whatsapp is more popular (based on personal experience). Whatsapp is absolute leader in India as well.

Are the chat apps that are popular in the west any more open than the Japanese and Korean ones? Would making Facebook (incl. Whatsapp & Instagram) more dominant help open platforms?

I'm visiting Japan quite often and made some Japanese friends. Line is quite popular, partly because you can exchange IDs instead of phonenumbers and the stickers. You can see that Japanese people value privacy if you log in to their PC client => all data on your phone is wiped, which is a bit unconvienent for me.

I think it's funny how every other app now copies the line stickers. Facebook does it too, but I'm not sure if it's really catching on here. Japan really likes cute stuff and since the language is a lot more polite and indirect it's probably easier to communicate with stickers.

Line is much better than WeChat tough, which has bad layout, low quality emoticons and doesn't feel native.

WeChat's feature for finding users closeby who opt-in is great. Please check that out, if you are an app developer!

I like Viber more, because their client works everywhere, actual voice calling is included, the software is fast and nice and they have great support, no battery drain like skype.

Line is huge in Thailand. So much so that the junta in power spent a lot of money giving away Line sticker as propaganda.

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/detail.php?newsid=1419235215

LINE is probably one of the big IM players in Indonesia as well aside from BBM (decreasing as users moving towards Android based phones) and WhatsApp.

That's a country with lots of users as well.

I rarely use Line except whenever I need to chat with my family/friends overseas but when it comes to IM, culture seems to dictate the user-experience. I use Google Hangout, Facebook Messenger, and Line.

Google Hangout and Facebook Messenger are alike and focus on one thing: conversation (sounds heavy eh?). Line focuses on expression/emotion (especially 'cuteness').

When I moved to another country from Japan, I couldn't carry over my account (which is associated with my e-mail).

Their customer support simply doesn't exist (yes, seriously), so I had to kiss goodbye to that account.

It looks cute (although I'm not sure it matches the taste of people from non-Asian cultures, and I don't think western people will be eager to buy or even use the stickers etc.), and everyone in Japan is using it. Given all these, it's going to be a tough for them to get into the market.

(and oh, the name is terrible in google search)

Yeah, account management in Line is crazy.

Log in on a different phone and EVERYTHING on the other phone gets deleted. For most people I know in Japan, loosing your phone means getting a new Line account.

People at softbank/docomo/AU should be able to help you migrate, though they might only help you migrate if your new phone is on contract with them.

Actually, if an user has assigned themselves an user name as oppposed to relying solely on phone number, they should be able to port over account. But despite number of articles (and some official docs) urging users to do so it sounds like a lot of people simply don't care. Though, it could be more straight forward, though.

I wouldn't rely on this. My LINE was set to a prepaid number that I had let expire on purpose. I thought I would be fine because I also had a username set. When someone else registered my number, I lost about 90% of my contacts. The only contacts I had left were ones that I was actively in conversation with. I believe this was actually a bug, but there isn't much recourse if it happens to you.

Ah, I see... I know when they've started expanding outside of Japan, they've actually dropped requirements to have a phone number associated with the account, and allowed Facebook account and E-mail address in lieu. Although, the requirement has been in place for Japanese users for a while -- I think it's now universally the same.

>It looks cute (although I'm not sure it matches the taste of people from non-Asian cultures, and I don't think western people will be eager to buy or even use the stickers etc.), and everyone in Japan is using it. Given all these, it's going to be a tough for them to get into the market.

I am married to a Japanese woman, we communicate mostly using LINE.

There are Western stickers now, too - for example, if you "follow" the Family Guy LINE account you get a set of Family Guy stickers. There's also a Marvel sticker set, a Dr. Who set and many more "merchandising" sets, I think that should work.

Of course, no merchandising opportunity is lost to the Star Wars people: https://store.line.me/stickershop/product/2005/en

If Telegram finds a way to open source their backend, then that could be a way for new chat apps to compete against Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and so on. The security issues of Telegram would need to be sorted out first off course. Both Telegram and WhatsApp uses phone numbers to identify users, so they could probably let users talk to each other, if they wanted to.

S Korea is usually best known for hardware products and not software/online products but they do have some innovative online sites.

Examples cyworld. Founded in 1999.

naver.com. Largest search engine in Korea. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/05online.html?_...

The stickers are a lot of fun. Facebook tried to copy it, but it's not the same.

It is actually from Korea

It's actually started by a Japanese subsidiary of Korean company; LINE corporation (which used to be Navar Japan), but I'm pretty sure its parent involved quite a bit, so I guess it can be considered from Korea...

You must be Korean, no?

It's not from Korea. It's by the Japanese subsidiary of the Korean company. You can _technically_ say it's Korean, but it really isn't.

By the way, I'm a Korean.

Were you born in S. Korea?

It is quite suspicious though. A Korean company makes a messaging app used by Japanese people.

Line may well be a spying tool. I'm pretty sure Korean would like to keep tabs and eavesdrop on Japanese.

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