The popular microblogging service on Thursday launched a Japan-based mobile version, hoping to penetrate a country where other U.S. social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace have failed to capture much ground.
Japanese is Twitter's sole foreign language 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.
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"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 this week 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.
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While Twitter already operates a mobile site in English, many of its features are incompatible with Japanese language usage. Instead, many mobile users here had been relying on third-party platforms like "movatwitter."
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