Cyworld Control Room in Seoul, Photo from Wikipedia

Stefan Hayden criticizes Chris Pirillo and comes with some interesting thoughts about Cyworld.

Cyworld really is revolutionary in it’s inclusion of elements from other places. Chris blows the service off as some kind of glorified geocities where you have to pay for backgrounds but it reality it is so much more. If I had to define it, after doing some research on it, I would more associate it to SecondLife. SecondLife has a monthly fee like World of Warcraft but you can pay extra money to buy things like land or whatever. While there have been detailed studies of online game economies since Ultima Online every one always seems to be surprised when actual money starts to come in to the picture.

[...] The trick seems to be offering something for free and then making available other stuff to buy. It’s a model cropping up all over the place. iTunes is a free download and does a great job on managing people’s music and now it even lets you manage your podcasts. Oh and if you’re up to it you can purchase music from one of the largest online music stores in the world. Google Earth is a free download with amazing functionality and with a small fee can also be upgraded to even more powerful features. It’s this kind of pseudo-shareware that seems to becoming very pervasive in the online market the way it was with video games in the early 90s.

See also:
Marc Canter and Cyworld