A recent study had Naver pulling down 64.2 percent of the search engine market in Korea, distantly trailed by Daum Communication Inc., which only logged 21.6.
NHN Corporation, the producers of Naver reported that users will be able to get instant feeds of news and other content updates on a personalized page, to share with friends on the the microblogging platform and to be provided customized search results.
Rhee Ram, a senior NHN official, said at a press conference that the company's main goal in the second half of this year is to "go social". Rhee was the creator of the "mini homepage"while serving with at NHN's rival, SK Communications Co.
South Korea was reported to be in the second position for annual increase in the number of social networking service users in July, behind Russia. Smartphones, which are capable of accessing the Internet and social networking sites, are gaining in popularity in Korea and should reach a 20% market penetration this year, account for users routine visits to Twitter & Facebook.
NHN intends to provide Twitter and Facebook-like services to an already popular Naver UI. Naver is so popular that they were responsible for driving approximately 2 million new users to Me2day, a Korean service that works like Twitter. It is likely that Naver will integrate many of the popular features found in other social networking sites into their version and link them to existing Naver services.
NHN also is slated to make upgrades to the mobile version of their site, which will make searching easier from the scaled-down functionality of mobile devices.
