Twitterizing by Claudia Sonea

Americans still dream to conquer Japan. Yet, they don’t aspire to a territorial conquest, but rather to a market invasion. Many US companies and sites have tried to penetrate Japanese market which shows to be reluctant to anything that it is not mobile. According to researches, the vast majority of Japanese are using their mobile phones to connect to the Internet, update their profiles, etc. After Facebook and MySpace failed to have a breakthrough on Japanese market, which represents a leading edge, with advanced mobile usage, it is now Twitter’s turn to do its best. The free social networking and micro-blogging service has ! launched in collaboration with the Internet firm Digital Garage a Japan-based mobile version this Thursday under the campaign "Mobile is in Twitter's DNA". Japanese web users showed interest in Twitter services like Movatwitter and Twitterpod even before Thursday and even Japanese celebrities and politicians are starting to see the marketing potential. However, there is too early for Twitter to consider it as a victory, because as seen on the US market, usually Twitter’s users quite after the first month. Moreover, there is also a strong competition coming from Mixi, a top social networking site with 17 million users which seems to be the Japanese correspondent of Facebook. What does Twitter bring new to Japan? In spite of not having groups in US, it has released the ability to follow groups on the Japanese version. Also, it will be the first version with banner ads, thus making way to the money business that made Google the Inter! net Midas: advertising. Whether Twitter will succeed on conque! ring the Japanese market or not, it remains to be seen. Stay connect, more to come…

related story (sgx15641): http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20091015/ap_on_hi_te/as_japan_...

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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