Twitter Inc now speaks more Japanese — and it plans to be multilingual within months.
The popular microblogging service launched a Japan-based mobile version on Thursday, hoping to penetrate a country where other US social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground.
Japanese is Twitter’s sole non-English platform so far, and the company’s efforts here indicate it’s serious about making it big in Japan — and eventually all over the world.
Twitter teamed up with Tokyo-based Internet firm Digital Garage Inc early last year. It launched a Japanese-language platform for PCs in the spring of last year, and hired a Japan country manager earlier this year.
“It’s an excellent opportunity for us to see where we can go in Asia in general because Japan represents a leading edge, with advanced mobile usage,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who traveled to Tokyo for the launch. “Mobile is in Twitter’s DNA.”
The company will roll out the site in Spanish, German, French and Italian over the next few months, Stone added.
The San Francisco-based company is also using Japan to experiment with ways to make money from features unavailable on its English language site, such as banner ads. It remains mum on how much revenue the ads have attracted so far.
Early adopters were largely male tech geeks, but 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 develop a locally friendly mobile platform, Digital Garage’s Rocky Eda said in June.
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