What would happen when, inevitably, it expanded into new markets such as Japan, with its finicky obsession with order? How would the unbridled chaos and freedom of the site appeal to a culture that, while boasting the crunchy aesthetic of wabi-sabi and a fetish for mashup collage in contemporary art and design, likes its chaos carefully controlled and peer-approved?

When it comes to embracing the web, Japan has often been accused of being late to the party, especially compared to neighbor South Korea, where the online gaming culture is an unmatched phenomenon. Yet, when MySpace arrived in Japan last year, it was the one that was late to the party. There was already a seven-hundred pound godzilla waiting in the shadows: a little site called Mixi. Though Yahoo!Japan boasts more traffic, everyone Japanese knows that Mixi is where it’s at when it comes to networking.

A homegrown brand that has tapped into the culture code to attract 6.6 million users as of late 2006, Mixi is the underdog in terms of sheer scale. For Japanese speakers and non-Japanese speakers alike, the most instantly recognizable asset is its design. Issues of taste aside, there is no arguing that the layout, color scheme, and overall style are already miles ahead of MySpace. And this is doubly important, because unlike MySpace, for better and worse, there is no way for users to tweak the code to decorate their individual pages. Although the potential for self-expression is reduced, that’s ok. Mixi is a site with a different aim: community building.

Mixi’s barrier to entry, its invite-only membership system, is the gate, albeit a low one, that surrounds the community at large. Upon gaining access, creating one’s member page is arguably the least important activity. Rather, it is all about getting connected, and not in the superficial sense of MySpace, where anyone and everyone can be friends with Madonna. Within the larger community of Mixi, there are thousands of smaller communities, most commonly formed around shared interests, from fashion to fetish. Yes, there are such groups on MySpace too, but on Mixi they are really the core activity. People don’t build vanity pages, in large part because they can’t. Members of communities keep close tabs on the blogs, comments, reviews, and announcements of fellow members, and are even able to monitor who has visited their page. The commercial potential of such tightly knit consumer enclaves is huge, and brands have wasted little time engaging these communities on Mixi, offering secret product launches that build loyalty and guarantee sales. Users also post reviews of their favorite products, complete with links to online retailers like Amazon.

But again, in Mixi land, you better like the flavor vanilla, because that is all you are going to get, unless you consider the “Favorite Pet” text box in the user profile an opportunity to get wild and crazy. The design scheme is of a feminine bent, but not to the point where it would threaten the “manliness” of male users. More positive points are scored through a much more intuitive layout to information on the personal pages. Even though this information is fairly close to what you get on MySpace, you don’t have to go scrolling down the page for it.

MySpace has made extensive changes to its offerings to stay competitive with the rising crop of competitors in the US, with politics, news, weather, and ringtone categories recently added. Such diversified content could make it more competitive with Mixi, but unfortunately MySpace Japan contains just a small fraction of what is available on the US site. The usual stuff is there—blogs, videos, and music—but nothing compelling enough to win converts in droves. Strangely, a Shunsuke Nakamura “virtual soccer school” is listed as featured content, although, unlike the name suggests, the soccer school is real world—only registration is “virtual.” Music event promotion seems to be one of the main niches MySpace Japan is shooting for, with heavy promotion across the site. But with stringent copyright laws preventing major artists from getting their groove on the site, it is difficult to tell if MySpace’s efforts will really distinguish it that much from Mixi.

In terms of graphic layout, the Japanese MySpace is very much cut out of the same ragged cloth as the US site. One positive is this allows the two to interact seamlessly, enabling Japanese to “friend” users across the globe and adding the attraction of internationalism. For a small slice of the population, this may be worth the price of receiving buckets of sex site spam ads, but for the majority, community means Japanese.

Therein lies the real answer to the question of which site will dominate Japan. Mixi, designed to appeal to the community-oriented mentality of Japanese people, and with a stylish, intuitive, yet inadaptable interface that promises stability and uniformity, clearly displays a greater awareness of the user needs of its market (not to mention running the inside track as the more established brand). On the other hand, MySpace could cash in on the same “street cred” that led to its rise to ubiquity, the under-designed feel that legitimizes it to the youth. It boasts advantages in sharing music and video, though Mixi also shares these capabilities to a less developed extent. The first challenge will be to establish some name recognition in a market that already has upwards of 1,500 similar services. But the greater challenge will be to make sure the service strikes a chord with the culture. At the moment, the Mixi website is the only one of the two that does.