“LINE” is an application for texting, sending pictures and videos, calling and video conferencing, which is hugely popular in Japan. The franchise is owned by the Korean company “Naver”.
Launched in 2011, LINE reached 100 million users within its first eighteen months and 200 million users only six months later, becoming Japan’s most popular social network with currently over 800 million users and is growing continuously.
LINE was developed as a smartphone application, though by now it is available for all kinds of devices, including desktop PC.
The history behind LINE’s huge success in Japan is intertwined with a typical Japanese problem – earthquakes.
In March 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake damaged Japan’s telecommunication network nationwide, resulting in internet-based communication becoming the way to go. The company’s engineers developed “LINE” to fight the problem of telephones becoming useless in the areas struck by the earthquake and made it available to the public.
The application proved to be hugely popular and by late October, LINE experienced an unexpected server overload.
Gaining popularity each year, LINE received various feature updates, reaching from a timeline concept similar to Facebook, over games, to the hugely popular stickers, which can be bought in the LINE online store.
With opening up physical stores in bigger Korean and Japanese cities to sell the iconic characters’ merchandise, LINE took another leap towards being a fixed part of East Asian culture, and there is no end in sight.
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