jarkolicious

Piqniq; Social Networking in Japan

• japan

Piqniq is a new social networking site for foreigners in Japan. Their target audience is families that are English speakers, who are looking to help meet and socialize with others people and families in the same situation. I was asked by the Piqniq team to perform a review of the site, which they will ultimately pay me for.

I initially spoke to one of the team members after they ran across my blog on ReviewMe. We first communicated via email, where I offered up some initial thoughts on Piqniq, which then migrated to my being asked to conduct a more thorough review. What follows are my honest thoughts and observations on what appears to be an untapped market. No morals were sacrificed in the authoring of this review, so rest assured that my honesty meter is at full throttle.

Being a foreigner in Japan is no easy task. English, while sparingly used on signs and other goods in an attempt to look “cool” is not a language that the Japanese take too kindly to. Many of the services that are offered in Japan are there solely for those that can speak the language. It is because of this barrier that many foreigners have a difficult time adapting to the environment.

Imagine not being able to read the newspaper and therefore losing access to the classified advertisements, and other little, yet important, things that we generally take for granted every day. This is, for most “gaijin,” the norm in Japan.

Due to the aforementioned, it is a rarity to find a place (virtual or otherwise) that offers services catering towards the sharing of information between foreigners living in Japan. In fact, I can not think of any time or location upon which I came in to contact with such a service throughout my tenure in Japan. This is where Piqniq comes in to play.

Piqniq’s “About Us” page offers the following description of the site:

Are you raising a family in Japan? Do you have trouble getting simple things done? Piqniq is a Social Network Service tailored specifically toward English-speaking families living in Japan. Our concept is “Families helping Families” and we invite anyone that wants to meet other families, help other families, or discuss family-related issues pertinent to life in Japan to come and join the Piqniq!

The basic idea behind Piqniq is to be a comfortable place for English speaking foreigners in Japan to discuss raising kids in Japan, babysitting and day care, schools and other activities for children, medical assistance and more. The foundation for the site is really geared towards information sharing more than anything. This is the area that Piqniq will really excel, not the social networking aspect.

Although the site is billed as “Japan’s Family Social Network,” Piqniq is really not in the same league of social networking sites as the giants, like Facebook and MySpace, are. I would not characterize Piqniq as a new breed of social networking either, unless you consider sites like Fark or MeFi social networking sites.

Piqniq has a very attractive design. The soft blue tones mixed with the rich green and the white background make Piqniq visually appealing. In my browsing around the site I did not find myself getting upset with the design; the interface did not get in my way or hamper me whatsoever. In fact, I found Piqniq quite simple to navigate.

So what features does Piqniq have to offer?

Like most sites of this genre, the true value in Piqniq is signing up for a free account and engaging the community. Piqniq does offer one the ability to sign-up for an account and even goes so far as to give each user their own profile page. But, as I said before, the core of Piqniq is information sharing. What better way to share information than to base the site around blogging and forum posting?

I do not see any real leading by example taking place on the site yet, so I can only surmise that, foundationally speaking, the objective that Piqniq is pointing towards is for people to post blog entries that offer help and advice for English speaking foreigners in Japan. The blogging aspect of the site appears to be the main feature that a user is supposed to engage. However, without what appears to be any real public facing leadership at the helm of the ship I am uncertain if that is what the team is truly after.

The blogging feature is also used as a means of aggregating the content from all posts by all users. Piqniq users can browse the “blogs” section of the site in order to see what everyone is posting. This feature is not all that rich at the moment, in that you can only browse by date from newest to oldest. Hopefully granular controls will be added in the future, to make it easy to drill down and find exactly what you are looking for.

In addition to the blogging, there is also a forum that all users can participate in. It appears to be your standard, run of the mill forum, which allows users to create topics in any one of four predetermined forum categories: Japan Life, Moving to Japan, Open Forum and The Marketplace. The majority of site activity is currently taking place on the forums. Since Piqniq is in its infancy, there is minimal action, though as traffic picks up I imagine the forum posting will as well.

Piqniq also offers a “Japan Directory,” which is really a hierarchical list of links to external web sites that might be useful to English speaking foreigners living in Japan. All Piqniq users are afforded the ability to add to the “Japan Directory,” thus taking the burden off the administration for posting all the content to that area.

Rounding out the features is a member’s directory, which lists all members of the site. I do not recall seeing an option that allows for one to opt-out of the directory although I presume it exists somewhere within the settings area. Unfortunately, I am unable to locate its precise location at the moment.

Each registered user is given their very own profile page. This simple page displays the users recent blog entries, the length of time they have been a member, a user submitted picture and some minimal profile information. The design is elegant and minimalistic, yet somehow feels as if it is missing something. The one thing that I truly dislike about the user pages is the URL structure. Rather than being based on something like a username, similar to how Flickr handles things, Piqniq bases it on the user’s ID number. This means the URL looks quite “ugly” as such: http://www.piqniq.jp/user/530

Piqniq has functionality that allows users to submit polls. I am not entirely certain how this feature works, as I created a poll that did not display anywhere, although I did receive feedback that the poll was created successfully. Presumably, the poll shows up on the Piqniq blog aggregation page and needs to be quality-control checked before being posted. If this is the case then it is a smart move, especially because I can see this feature being abused by the standard internet nitwit.

The folks behind the site told me that the feature set is not yet complete. This was one of the first things that the team mentioned. I take the team for their word when they advised me that they continue to work on the site and will be adding features to it as required. To what extent are they currently working on features which have yet to be rolled out is unknown to me, although I must assume that there is something more in the works.

Conclusion

Although I am uncertain if Piqniq is completely home grown code or not, it does have that blogging platform feel to it. If I were to venture a guess, which I am probably completely off on, I would say that Piqniq appears to be a customized Drupal installation. This is not to point out anything other than to just say that Piqniq, foundationally, really feels like a blogging platform more than anything. It feels like a scaled-down Wordpress.com that is geared towards Japan rather than open to anything.

I truly believe that the idea behind Piqniq is a noble one. The team is attempting to fill a void that exists and aid the English speaking foreign community in Japan. That is a pretty large community to cater to and can definitely yield some benefits, assuming that Piqniq takes off, which I expect it to.

Piqniq has a decent feature set that should allow it to meet what appears to be its main objective of information sharing. What I do not understand is why they made the choice to use blogging as the mechanism for information sharing. Additionally, Piqniq bills itself as a social networking site yet there are no true social networking controls yet.

The problem I see with the blogging aspect of Piqniq is that people already have blogs. They have their own personal blog, their MySpace or Facebook account, their Vox account, etc… Piqniq now becomes an added burden, so to speak, in that a user has to actively think about posting something specifically to Piqniq, in addition to the many places that they already have to maintain.

I foresee that as being problematic in the future, unless there are features added that lessen that obligation. Granted, nothing is a decent substitute for a passionate individual who is truly interested in helping out the Piqniq community. What benefit does a user see on Piqniq when posting an exceptional amount of quality content?

Off the top of my head, one feature that might prove to be useful would be allowing users to automagically import an RSS feed to be used as their Piqnic blog entries. Facebook offers this functionality, by allowing users to syndicate content from their own blogs as “notes” on Facebook. A similar feature on Piqniq could prove to be highly attractive. Allowing users to say, point Piqniq towards their own blogs’ “Japan” category, they ultimately ensure that content is added to Piqniq, while not forcing users to physically duplicate their posting efforts. This means that relevant content can find its way to the Piqniq community, where it might be highly beneficial.

With that said, I do believe that in due time, and with some more work on the features, that Piqniq will grow to become a compelling site to visit daily. It is in a great position now, especially since it is in its infancy, and therefore is poised to hit that home run that so many of us gaijin need here in Japan.

I look forward to watching Piqniq and seeing what the future holds in store for it. After all, I have a really good reason to see the site succeed, especially since I do live in Japan!