DoCoMo last to jump on mobile social networking bandwagon

Just the very next day after I wrote the post about DoCoMo's lack of mobile social network offering, as DoCoMo announced a partnership with Rakuten, the biggest online shopping portal in Japan. Besides the Internet auction services for mobile phones and PCs, the companies will also offer a social networking service (SNS). The service called Okutomo (which in translation from Japanese means Auction Friends) is scheduled for launch on November 20th.

While Okutomo will have all the features of regular SNS such as user profiles, blogging, comments, and avatars, the main focus of it is on the commercialization by tightly integrating the service with the mobile auction platform jointly offered by DoCoMo and Rakuten. Users or auction friends who get to know each through the auction process will be able to view each other profiles and products they are selling, which should encourage users to share information about particular products and purchase the items based on other users' reviews, not on product's mere description. Okutomo users will be also able to create tags for easy search and matching similar products and inviting auction friends to create groups based on similar interests. The newly created groups can even limit the auction to be held within the group members only. I can envision Japanese otaku (refers to an obsessive fan of any one particular hobby) creating special interest groups and trading their collectibles along with social networking.