Possibly explains why Mori and Anraku and others are tweeting from their cell phones

By Steve Spillman
Posted Friday, July 23, 2010 - 5:09pm
In case you weren’t convinced by the tweets-per-second record set at the end of a Japan-Denmark World Cup match last month, there is building evidence that proves Twitter is huge in Japan. A recent survey of mobile-phone users in the country suggests that nearly 30 percent of that population uses Twitter, compared with only about 7 percent in the United States. Alexa traffic ratings show Japan is Twitter’s third-biggest traffic market, trailing only India and the United States. Twitter does have a major competitor—it’s called Mixi—but in recent months, Twitter’s traffic has begun to eke ahead of it.

Last night, at a tweetup held in Tokyo, Twitter CEO Evan Williams thanked Japanese fans for helping Twitter grow in that important market and was met by more than 500 devotees. He tweeted just once from the event—a TwitPic showing just how fervent the press was to see him.

Assisting the Japanese Twitter trend is its ubiquity in the media. It’s commonly featured on television, on magazine covers, and in public, as it is here in the States. Perhaps the most interesting reason for Twitter’s popularity, though, is its character limit. Because of the nature of the Japanese alphabet, much more can be expressed in 140 characters than can be in languages that use a Latin alphabet. Is it possible that Twitter could benefit in the United States from extending its word limit accordingly?

The fact that I am a topic of discussion on Twitter is further proof that Twitter has arrived in Japan:

http://toyboxdx.com/phorum/read.php?5,219735