I mentioned the success of South Korean 'minihompies' (miniature home pages) before. Now CNN's Working Tech has written up about them, with this to say about the cultural aspects of whether such a service will be popular in the US.
And part of Cyworld's success can be chalked up to users' incessant message-swapping - not answering a missive from a friend with all due speed is considered a faux-pas in Korean society.
There is a chance that the rise of broadband and the rise of online gaming will not be so interlinked on this side of the Pacific (though the runaway success of World of Warcraft suggests otherwise). There's a chance that US social networkers may prefer a stripped-down service with no avatars, bells or whistles.
But don't forget that US wireless operators used to dismiss Japanese advances in mobile phones in much the same way. Do users really want to send text messages, watch video on their phones, or buy ringtones, they mused, or is that something peculiar to Japan? Well, as it turned out, they do, and companies that bet early on the notion that technology can cross cultural boundaries, like Sprint Nextel (Research) and Cingular, won out."
Well, I've been saying this for a long time, and even tried (perhaps not very persistently) to get a company going that would provide mobile minihompy type services for the UK. But I gave up, and I'm still not sure the time is right or the operators have the right strategy yet for it to succeed in the UK, despite the success of Myspace.