The use of Twitter has increased manifold in Japan with an average of more than three thousand tweets per second during the recent Japanese-Danish games in last year’s world cup! Twitter is a hot selling item with Japanese people, most of whom prefer it to the Japanese rival of Twitter, known as Mixi, in Japanese, because Mixi demands a high level of conversation etiquette from its loggers. So, many Japanese feel happy that they are good to go with the much more informal Twitter and communicate informally and comfortably.
Also, the Japanese feel at liberty using Twitter because it allows a higher number of characters per message: one hundred and forty, instead of the lesser amount of alphabets permitted by Mixi in Japanese. A major reason for the popularity of Twitter in Japan was the availability of Twitter in Japanese language when it started its operations in Japan. Coupled with the high number of characters allowed per message, Twitter was an instant success!
Twitter has already reached a record level of twenty billion tweets! Twitter announced that Japanese users alone make up about twelve e percent of total global tweets! This figure makes the Japanese second only to the population in the United States. It is estimated that about eight million Japanese tweets are written each day and increasing.
Hundreds of books titled Twitter have been published in Japan. In the December of last year, Twitter surpassed Mixi to become the most visited site in Japan with a record 14.6 million visitors, an increase of about 176% from last year’s stats.
Another reason of Twitter’s enormous popularity in Japan is that unlike Mixi, people do not create anonymous profiles on Twitter; instead they create profiles with their real names on it and communicate as such.
Also, on midnight of 31 December last year, Twitter fans in Japan created another world record by sending almost seven thousand tweets per second!
Also contributing to the success of Twitter was the cell phone version which jumped the number of visits to the website enormously because the total number of cell phones in Japan is greater than the strength of the entire population there with many people owning and using more than one cell phone!
However, recently, Twitter has started charging customers in Japan for access to their tweets as well as to send them. Other services such as Mixi have been doing so for a long time as customers in Japan are used to paying for online services. It will have to be seen however how the introduction of the “pay-for-tweet” system affects the number of users of Twitter in Japan.