CyWorld: Victim of a ‘Winner Take all Web’?

Probably nobody who reads this blog cares that teenage-girl-centric CyWorld is shutting down. I wrote a reasonably lengthy post about it when the Korean-based social network launched in the US in September, 2006. Back then Twitter wasn’t on the scene and MySpace was the dominant site:

For any new market entrant in the social media/networking space the question of course is: how do you expect to compete with MySpace, et al.?

Well it obviously didn’t/couldn’t. And this seems symbolic to me of the paradox of the increasing “winner take all” nature of the Internet: the vastness of online, especially in the social media realm, is dominated by a small number of sites and everyone else is shut out. But this is not just true of social media where “network effects” are perhaps most pronounced, but in a range of other areas.

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Related: Once white hot virtual world Second Life (remember them?) shifts focus to the enterprise.