MySpace has finally launched in Korea. It was later than expected, but it wasn’t as if Koreans were begging for yet another blog service. What with Facebook coming in as well, I’m sure people at Cyworld and Naver are getting worried.

And they should. Because they had excellent services a few years ago, making their services and applications way ahead of U.S. services, but they failed to keep up in innovation as the American services began to catch up. Of course, a lot of the applications, such as photo-editing, are still way better than those of U.S.-based blog/SN services, but creativity has fallen down the drain.

And what might be the reason? Primarily because these companies should be looking for people who think out of the box, but in fact they want and train people to think inside the box. And though these services were “wowee” in the beginning, after they were gobbled up by bigger companies, their creativity went flaccid. It just shows that development of the Internet takes more than engineers, but people who have good ideas and people who are actually passionate about the service.

Once, I asked the CEO of SK Communications (the company that runs Cyworld) what his vision was 10 years from now. He answered that he couldn’t even see two years from now, let alone 10 years. Now I know that it’s hard to envision anything about the Internet since it develops so quickly, but if the CEO of a major Internet firm is caught up in today, it’s just so wrong.

AP did a fairly fair coverage of the MySpace launching.