Twitter goes to Japan

Twitter is about to launch in Japan later this year according to this source. Also mentioned here.

This seems to be a localized version. The first non-english one.

Twitter.jp is already registered, but it doesn't look like it belongs to Twitter? Or does it? Do you know japanese? As the text on Twitter.jp is enclosed as images I can not run it through a translator.

Here is a japanese news story. And here is the translated version.

Update 080117: ..and here is the Twitter blog post covering this...

Twitter struggles with new features

The new Twitter features mentioned by Techcrunch seems to be live. However with some problems.

When I access the main Twitter site I get the user interface version that is tailored for mobile devices. Is it only me?

And the new Blocks navigation at http://explore.twitter.com looks nice. But is it really adding value to the navigation?

I found how to view a specific user in Blocks. I am at http://explore.twitter.com/blocks/#johan

Oh well. It's Friday. It's late. I'm going to bed. My guess is that the Twitter team will have stuff to work with :-) I will check back and see if it looks better tomorrow. I do like Twitter, but right now they need to improve the latest release.

Twitter stuff

I like Twitter. It might be such a rare thing as a combination of both a killer app and a killer attitude.

A killer app, since I believe it really has opened up a completly new way of interaction (micro blogging or mood blogging). It's a natural combination of two mainstream behaviours (blogging and SMS), but still it took until last year until someone created such a service. Still some time before we can call Twitter mainstream, but I am convinced Twitter (or some other brand with the same service) will become mainstream over time.

A killer attitude, since the SMS generated are "free of charge" for you as a user (see eg this post). The SMS costs are seen as OPEX by Twitter. The business model is not obvious either, as stated by some recent investors.

Oh well, two reasons I posted this today:

1. I just answered a question on LinkedIn Answers around Twitter.
2. Yesterday I found evidence that I am a Twitter pebble (see my previous post), at least in Sweden. According to this post I was the fifth person in Sweden to start Twittering. I am also on the top 5 lists for number of 'followers' and 'following' in Sweden (and not for number of tweets, trying to keep down on them :-)

And find me at http://twitter.com/johan to follow my tweets. Or tweet 'follow johan' if you're already on Twitter.