Social Network Services are huge in Japan. About 45 million Japanese use at least one of the more than 102 available SNS. However Social Network Services in Japan are still one of the fastest growing online services in Japan and new niche SNS are emerging on a regular base.
Recently so called ‘Oegaki-Chats‘ gain a lot of attention and popularity. ‘Oegaki’ is a Japanese term for “to draw” or “to scribble” and ‘Oegaki-Chat‘ stands for communities where users can share their artwork or communicate through paintings.
The most popular drawing community is ‘pixiv’. Launched in September 2007, ‘pixiv’ now has more than 600,000 registered members, 3 million submissions and about 500 million page views per month (February 2009). Users can share their illustrations and get feedback through ratings or user comments. Most of the illustrations are anime, manga or video game related. Drawings can be uploaded in 3 groups: 2D (e.g. Photoshop creations), 3D (e.g. Poser creations) and analog (e.g. writing brushes). Therefore ‘pixiv’ promotes ‘ComicStudio’, a professional manga drawing software with a special pen tablet. Additionally all uploaded images are organized in an extensive tag structure.
The ‘pixiv’ community grew very fast and top-rated artists even receive a cult like status be fans. Meanwhile there are several live events with competitions throughout the year and exhibitions are held and famous artists give demonstrations. Between February 27th and March 1st 2009, Pixiv held their first convention, ‘Pixiv Festa’, at the East Design Festa Gallery in Tokyo’s Omotesando with exhibitions of 145 different artists.
In October 2008 ‘pixiv’ launched a new community called ‘drawr’. This flash-based system enables users to draw directly in a web application via mouse or pen tablet. This new service is very simple to use, has no search function or tagging system at all and targets a younger user group than ‘pixiv’. Former users of ‘pixiv’ can log in with their existing accounts, but all images and comments can also be viewed without sign-up on both mobile and PC browsers. The interesting feature is that comments can only be made through handwriting or paintings.
Very similar to this community is ‘tegaki blog’. ‘tegaki’ stands for “handwriting”, therefore all images and also comments are also in handwriting. The default widescreen comment field can be changed to picture size in order to reply in whole images. Some artists also use the comment field to write complete manga short stories or continue picture series of other users. There is no real search function except of through tags in this page. All tags are user generated graphics and are managed by users themselfes. In September 2008 ‘tegaki blog’ had 126.000 registered users and 90 million page views per month. Registered users’ age group ranges from early 10s to later 20s.
In early 2008 the Flash Engineer Munehara remembered that when he was in school every student used to write and paint on the blackboards during holidays. Just for fun, he programmed a simple page, now known as ‘kokuban.in’, where you could just write on a blackboard (Japanese: “kokuban”) and save your painting.
By accident some schoolboys found his page on the internet and spread the word. In the next holidays season his page got stormed by thousands of high school students. Today there are more than 100.000 registered users. While in the beginning more than half of the users were Junior High students, today there is a wide range of users. Women in their 40s and man over 65 are the biggest user groups behind school children. The success of ‘Kokuban.in’ can be seen under nostalgic aspects for elderly, but is mostly in its anonymity and tolerance for users who are not good at painting. Everybody can post everything, share it and get a feedback.
Conclusion
SNS drawing is a recent phenomenon that is still at an early stage but already attracts hundreds of thousands of users. We expect this movement to grow much stronger in the next months to come. It is likely that big SNS service like mixi and Gree will start to add these drawing features in the near future. With the latest touch enabled handsets, mobile drawing clients will also start to appear soon. Crowdsourced designs, drawings and idea sketches could open up a new field of opportunities for brands and future business.
