Ipart.cn; Undisturbed Digital Domestic Bliss.

Whilst it’s difficult to find a branded social community having little or no predators, ipart.com definitely leads the way. It could be one of the few communities that hosts a disturbance-free online atmosphere, and given the site basically operates a virtual ‘apartment’ where complete strangers (mostly boys and girls) live under the one roof it’s pretty impressive.

Ipart is a major web 2.0 Avatar-SNS blog (think Qzone) mostly targeting female white collars and college students in Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The community tries to create a sweet and cozy SNS feel. As I navigated through the community I’m filled with joy, refreshing, sweet, love, fashionable, artistic, trendy…anything girlish – well at least that’s the feeling they wanted to give me.

Little costly sweet apartment

ipart, as is named, provides virtual apartment service. The above picture shows the main stage for each member, together with common functions as notes, virtual pet, gift box, picture album, etc.

The first time you log in, the site would first recommend you to look for a roommate to “live in” with, so as to carry out the idea of “social networking”. The system will also automatically help to select some users of your opposite gender. Then, you start to decorate your apartment, buy pets, plant flowers in the garden, dress up yourself.

To finish a series of apartment and dressing could cost 10~20 RMB, but don’t worry, many items are free to VIP users, which reveals what’s behind the seemingly sweet home. Ipart sells whatever a virtual apartment need online, just as you pay for everything for an apartment in reality. Generally, one item of virtual product costs from 0.5 ~ 10 “I coin” depending on different levels.

10 I coin=10 RMB
20 I coin=20 RMB
55 I coin =50 RMB
115 I coin=100 RMB

There are monthly memberships that cost 5RMB /month and VIP 12 RMB/month varies on the privileges you enjoy. What’s critical here is, hey, it’s incredibly much cheaper than a real apartment, isn’t it?! Especially given the crazy real estate goes these days, besides, can you just pull someone living in with you so easily? You need to do “pre-domestication” cultivation!

Dreamy girls form the main traffic
The site claims itself target at college girls and female white collars. I’m thinking most of its users are female, yet from an overview of the open personal info, white collar isn’t of big possibility. As most I can see age around 20 (16~24), high school girls and college students, who favor cute staffs, have a somehow childlike innocence, and a great deal of leisure time, are whom we are talking about.

Then how many engaged people we are really talking about? Ipart was first launched in August 2005, approximately four years to now, the result is, not bad. In November 2008, its registered members reached 14 million.

As one evidence of web 2.0 Avator trend in China to Asia
In a function level, Qzone is by all means the representative of web 2.0 Avator. The two websites even have a few identical modules, such as the virtual room, characters image, which are almost the same. But, no need to say that Qzone is way superior to iPart for its huge basis, that Qzone is just one of those byproduct money machines of China’s SNS master QQ.com.

Ipart definitely has its reason to allocate service to all girls in mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Little tiny SNS sites like this have been popular for quite a period of time around Asian countries. One particular foreign site that I have former acquaintance of is cyworld.com, a South Korean site I tracked back to as following a South Korean singer.

The Chinese site of cyworld was also set in 2005; it ranks 512 among all websites in China, while ipart.cn, the 509. Ipart focus more on “virtual love relations”, “decorations”, “dress”; cyworld is “cleaner”, with no specific tendency on social network for a particular relationship. It’s more neutral and ipart is definitely more girlish.

Are westerns so into this intricate virtual character and space game? Maybe not as much as Asians. Cyworld (from South Korea) has set its Chinese, Taiwan, USA, Japan and Vietnam sites. In Japan, there seems to be a even cuter space called Meropar, which hasn’t been localized but is under use for Taiwan netizens.

Taiwan has often appreciated Japan’s style; it’s no surprise that they have set up their own mini space, for virtual pet raising, constellation matching, and other fashionable stuffs.

Making Shopaholics’ money
Women are shopaholics, so when most of your customers are girls – that’s a good news to advertisers. Among all product categories, those featuring fashion/youth/fun and are reasonable in price have the best chance. For instance, the “ice cream” cellphone of LG; HP hip-hop campaign; young idol TV series; Taobao.com; Mawelon (uh-oh); Dove the chocolates; skin care products… Many online campaigns have also been evolved on this site.

How I feel about it
You wouldn’t set up another blog if you’ve got Qzone, msn space, hi baidu or other blog pages, unless you are young to join in bloggers ( traditional ideas of “blog” haven’t limited or bored you), or you have a lot leisure time. That’s why they are young.

Ipart has managed to select a group of people through its distinguishable feature – you know immediately whether you belong here at the first sight of the homepage. They are girls who has sweet dreams of love, home, life, pets, dresses…

Now one question left is, whether its claimed clean online environment a myth? From the appearance of the pages, yes; from what I’ve experienced since registered-actually I experienced nothing for no one bugged me at all- so I say, yes.

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Tagged as: Arts and Entertainment, Asia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of China, Society and Culture, South Korea