Twitter announced fifteen minutes ago that they will expand their services to Japan. The blog post says: “Despite the fact that Twitter is in English, we continue to see exciting growth from all over the world. Japan, in particular shows a very strong and growing demand for Twitter services. Movatwitter and Twitterpod are great examples.”
In order to cover Japan in a decent and Twitter-worthy way, they partnered up with Digital Garage. This company has made an investment in Twitter and will commit engineering and other development resources because hey, you gotta return the favor.
The guys from Twitter are looking forward to cross-ocean adventure: “We’re really excited about Twitter Japan because it’s a big step towards our goal of becoming a worldwide communication network.”
Thank you, Robin Wauters from the conference Plugg, for tipping us!
So the one thing I don’t get is how Twitter is planning on handling Japanese text and the whole SMS thing.
Lest we forget that Japan’s “mobile” is not the same mobile as the rest of the world. Messages, “web” — it’s all this proprietary (yet open) mish-mosh of iMode DoCoMo weirdness.
Is a Japanese tweet going to be 160 Japanese characters? 160 unicode characters? Is using a two-byte character (Japanese kanji, for example) going to eat 2 Twitter characters? who knows.
Hi, I have just been playing with the Japanese setting on my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/hirohurl and it seems that you get 140 characters to play with. When you type in Japanese you can save space by converting Hiragana phonetic script into Chinese characters (kanji).
I have a twitter “what am I doing” widget on my website and I just checked it after posting a Japanese msg, and sure enough, there was the message in Japanese script.
I can see why twitter is popular in Japan as it is well set up for use on mobile phones, it is short and tweet, so it has a high cutesy-immediacy factor which the Japanese love.
David Hurley