Photo by The Korea Herald/Asia News Network
SEOUL — Cyworld, the dominant social networking site in South Korea before the era of Facebook throughout the 2000s, was set to reopen Monday evening, with many in their 30s and 40s ripe with anticipation to revisit their past.
Cyworld Z, the company that bought Cyworld in January this year, said it has recovered some 17 billion photos and over 100 million videos stored in the old servers.
With nearly 32 million members at one point, Cyworld was the uncontested champion of social media here, as the country’s younger generation spent hours decorating their own pages and digging up information about other people.
Major companies and universities eventually blocked access to Cyworld to stop employees and students from spending too much time there during working or school hours.
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Following the arrival of the iPhone in Korea in 2009, however, Cyworld slowly gave way to Facebook and others that ran mobile services, and even suffered a massive data leakage incident in 2011.
Former Cyworld users can log in from 6 p.m. on Monday and check on their photos, videos, messages, background music and number of acorns, or “dotori” – a unit of virtual currency spent to decorate their page.
