TOKYO - Twitter Inc is turning Japanese. Or at least trying to. The popular microblogging service on Thursday launched a Japan-based mobile version, hoping to penetrate a country where other U.S. social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground.
Japanese is Twitter’s sole foreign language platform so far, and the company’s efforts here indicate it’s serious about making it in Japan.
Twitter teamed up with Tokyo-based Internet firm Digital Garage Inc in early 2008. It launched a Japanese-language platform for cellphones and other mobile devices in the spring of 2008, and hired a Japan country manager earlier this year.
The company is experimenting with making money from features it doesn’t use on its English language site, such as banner ads.
While early adopters were mainly male tech geeks, the messaging service is finally gaining some traction in mainstream Japan. Between January and June, the number of users jumped almost fourfold to 783,000, according to Internet research firm NetRatings.
Japanese celebrities and politicians are starting to sign up. So are traditional media outlets like newspapers and radio stations as well as municipalities and companies eager to take advantage of Twitter’s marketing potential.
Lawmaker Kenzo Fujisue first heard about Twitter from a friend in Silicon Valley and now tweets regularly throughout the day. He has more than 5,400 followers, and his 140-character messages—all in Japanese—range from serious policy issues to the more mundane, like what he ate for dinner.
“People don’t really know what politicians do,” he said. “Twitter helps me give people a glimpse of the lawmaking process.”
Still, Twitter remains a mystery to the vast majority of Japanese web users. Mixi, the country’s top social networking site, has 17 million users and is aiming for 30 million within four years.
The key to expansion in Japan is to go mobile, Digital Garage’s Rocky Eda said back in June.
A survey the company conducted earlier this year showed that 95% of Japanese Twitter users accessed the service via cell phones. Mobile-based writers account for some 40% of regular blogging in Japan, and about a quarter of Mixi users rely on their cell phones to update their pages.
While Twitter already operates a mobile site in English, many of its features are incompatible with Japanese language usage. Instead, many mobile users in Japan had been relying on third-party platforms like “movatwitter.”
The new Japanese mobile version was jointly developed by Twitter and Digital Garage, and is compatible with Japan’s major mobile carriers and the quirks of the local market. Emoticons can be imbedded into messages, and users can directly update their profile without having to turn to their PC.
Yukari Matsuzawa, Twitter’s Japan country manager, says that growth will also depend on users themselves.
“As Japanese people creatively start to use Twitter, it will help define what the tipping point will be,” she said. “It will be a combination of excellent innovative users in Japan as well as more celebrities, as well as influential people.”
(Another Story)
Twitter plans French, German, Italian and Spanish sites
Washington - Twitter, the fast-growing micro-blogging service, is seeking volunteer French, German, Italian, and Spanish translators to render its website into other languages.
Twitter’s website, Twitter.com, is currently only offered in English or Japanese.
Biz Stone, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based startup, said in a blog post that Twitter was planning versions of its website in other languages, starting with French, German, Italian and Spanish.
He invited a “small group” of Twitter users to become “volunteer translators” to suggest translations for the Twitter website.
“We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well,” he said.
“We’re very excited that more people will be able to use Twitter in their native language!” he added.
Twitter, which allows users to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages known as “tweets,” has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 and claims to have topped 50 million users.
9/06/2010 01:14:00 am
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