Since its launch in October 2006, S! Town has registered approximately 160,000 users, of which 30 to 40 percent use the service at least once per month. Its popularity among women aged 18-24 is one important driver of this growth.

Tomokazu Nakaya, responsible for S! Town at Softbank, says the mobile operator made a specific effort to fulfill the needs of this important group by providing a secure community of uniquely identified users and an easily accessible helpdesk. And there is one additional perk – the site has no record of malicious behavior.

In S! Town, mobile users can control and customize an avatar (a digital character), and use it to decorate their personal room, explore the virtual town, go shopping, play games, and even chat with other users.

In the virtual town, various events are constantly going on, such as contests, treasure hunts and role-playing. The town even gets special decorations during the Christmas season and users receive digital presents from S! Town’s Santa.

It is the three-dimensional environment that sets S! Town apart from similar mobile communities. “Users can experience excitement and convenience that cannot be gained through conventional text, image or video services,” Nakaya says.

There is no monthly fee for using the service but users pay based on the volume of data traffic. For example, starting up in S! Town (which requires about 25KB of data traffic) costs approximately USD 0.40, while changing the interior design of your personal room (about 100KB of traffic) costs approximately USD 1.60.

While the present business model is based on fees for volume of traffic, Nakaya says that future models could be more dependent on advertising revenues. Even now there are advertisements in the virtual town that lead users to client sites. Nakaya says that fees from service provisioning to enterprises is also a potential model.

The client for running S! Town is provided as pre-installed Java software on SoftBank’s 3G phones, while the service itself is powered by a platform called eXplo. This server-based platform from Gemini Mobile Technologies provides basic functions such as user and profile management, as well as the three-dimensional graphics.

While the mobile 2.0 revolution still has a while to go before it catches up with its fixed counterpart, its ubiquitous availability means it has great potential. Given that users of today’s online social networks rarely go out without their mobile phone, the mobile versions of these communities have a big advantage.

David Francisco