I have a mixi account - I’ve had it for a few months now. Mixi is a “social networking” site, very much like MySpace. However, the mixi pages don’t offer all the bells and whistles in page customization that MySpace does; this means Mixi looks about 8 million times better and runs about 80 million times faster than MySpace. (mixi is written in perl, I think)

As far as I can tell, it is very popular despite still being one of those “still-in-beta-so-the-site-is-invite-only” deals.

Here’s the drawback (for me): it’s pure, 100% Japanese - all the pages, all the buttons, everything. I had someone waiting to be my “friend” for about 2 months, until my wife came in and told me that’s what the red message across the top of the page meant. I try to write something in my mixi blog about once a month - I would do it more often, but it takes me forever to write anything in Japanese thanks to my pathetic language skills.

Also, it makes it hard for me to honestly evaluate the site; I’m sure there are lots of cool features and whatnot, I’m just to stupid to know how to use them!

So, mixi is cool and it’s helping my Nihongo skills.