Korea's Twitter gets acquired by Naver
Web 2.0 | 2008/12/22 13:48 | Web 2.0 Asia

Me2day, Korea's leading microblog service, has been acquired by Naver. Here's the ZDNet news article on the acquisition (in Korean) and here's CEO Suman Park's personal posting (also in Korean).

Me2day is a good service with many cool features (including mobile posting feature that's arguably better than that of Twitter), but the greatest hurdle for them was Korea's market situation where users hardly venture out of the portals to try new web services. The Naver partnership makes sense in that regards - if the service is great but is not getting explored by the many, why not bring the service closer to them? There is no doubt Me2day will see a huge spike in traffic once it's made available to Naver users.

To fend off the age-old criticism that the company is too closed, Naver is making various efforts to cast an "open company" image, and the addition of Me2day, a company that's been a big proponent of open web technologies, will help such efforts.

The deal is valued at KRW 2.2 billion (around US$2 million), which, in my opinion, could have been much higher given Me2day's market reach. But the current economy makes the whole a buyer's market, and Me2day was not venture backed (They've been bootstrapping with only sporadic angel fundings.) It was a rare case of publicly announcing the acquisition amount, which will potentially work to Naver's advantage for future acquisitions. Anyhow, big congratulations to Suman and the rest of the Me2day team.