Visitors to the Japanese App Store on iTunes today were greeted with an array of character parts that an astute eye could recognise as the cartoon character, Doraemon. Yahoo Japan (who has strong connections with Softbank, the carrier who has iPhone in the Japanese market) has released a selection of Doraemon themed Apps that have managed to take out positions 1 through 16 on the top Free Apps page.

The Apps themselves range from App versions of classic Doraemon comics to utilities and games. Below you can see a couple of screenshots of two utilities. A batery utility tells you how much time you have left of use of the common functions of the phone. A simple calculator simply has a Doraemon theme.

Doraemon is one of the best known and beloved characters in Japan, with children across the country growing up on his antics for generations, so it is not such a prize that the Apps are popular. I am not sure if Yahoo were trying to achieve this, but the result is quite a coup.

All 16 top places from the one company has to be a first. Has any other country had such dominance in their App store?

Back in January 16, 2007, me and Marc started up USN in some shared office space in Shibuya. 3 years later we have grown to a good sized team working with some great clients and getting more and more opportunities to “do our thing” from our office in Harajuku.

So, as we get kicked off into 2010 and start on a fresh year with many new opportunities and expectations, we have taken a moment to reflect on all that was achieved in 2009 (ie. Year 3) at UltraSuperNew Inc.

On our final day in the office for 2009, we spent a little time discussing our favorite projects for the year and for me, this past year was really something to be proud of. We managed to step it up to the next level this year, and even though some days it seemed like a tornado of different things all demanding attention, we managed to achieve a lot. In the end, keeping the list down to 10 projects was actually very hard, this could have been a much longer list.

So, without further ado, lets get the list going.

1. Missing Wheels (client : Red Bull)

In order to promote the call for entry for the Red Bull Box Cart Race, we bought 70 second hand bicycles, took off parts and placed them around the city with obvious signs that read “We have borrowed your wheel. We needed it to build our box cart for the Red Bull Box Cart Race and will return it to you after the race.”

We managed to create a new type of media with the bicycles, utilizing something that is in plain sight all over the place in busy shopping areas of Tokyo. Even though we had to answer some questions from the police since they were wondering why all these bicycles had no wheels, they found we were behaving completely legally and even complimented us on the idea.

The result was a lot of attention for the race, discussion online and off and in the end we managed to get about three times our goal for the number of entries for the race.

2. Crowdcast (client : Red Bull)

Red Bull Crowdcast is a new platform we developed for Red Bull to get people attending their events more involved with the brand and create a new source of media surrounding events.

Attendees at events can use a simple mobile application to upload photos of the event to a central server. The Red Bull Crowdcast website then publishes the content and provides a combined stream of images in real time back to mobile and PC users at the event or at home, as well as digital screens at the event. When watching in slideshow mode, images can take just a few seconds from submitting to appearing in the slideshow.

The images submitted are more spontaneous than the general material that is collected around events and are published much faster.

We did everything on this project from the concept to the programming to the running of the system, and have many more plans for the next year to take this to the next level in 2010.

3. Pump 20th Anniversary Party (client : Reebok)

We created a 20th anniversary party with a difference for the Reebok Pump at Mado Lounge on the 52nd floor of Roppongi Hills building in central Tokyo.

Apart from the general logistics, branding and planning, we had three key special features for the event that made this one a special one for me. The shoe display, projection screen and dance performance.

Reebok made 20 collaboration models with select specialty sneaker stores around the world, and we needed to display them in an interesting way at the event. The solution in the end was a special vacuum pack that we ended up doing by hand at the office because nobody had machinery the right size to do the sealing of the vacuum. The vacuum packed shoes were then hung on a custom built display. This one took a lot of hard work to execute, but ultimately an incredibly satisfying result that people really took notice of.

For the main space I wanted to make sure we had an interesting way to show the shoes as well, so we designed a special screen in the shape of a shoe silhouette that we then projected images of the 20 collaboration shoes on to. The footage was also programmed on a cycle with sound reactivity and some special tweak controls. The end effect was a floating shoe that pulsed to the beat sitting over the room with a backdrop of Tokyo city lights stretching out below.

Finally for entertainment, in addition to headliner Captain Funk, we had a dance performance by what I term “The ghosts of 1989″. Three guys in neon costume pulling off crazy b-boy dance moves.

We had a packed event and generated a lot of press and buzz around the 20th anniversary. By the end I was so tired from putting everything together I couldn’t even make it to the after party, but slept one of the most satisfied heavy sleeps I ever had.

4. pecha-kucha.org Renewal (client : Pecha Kucha)

This year marked the second major iteration of the Pecha Kucha online platform that we have put together in as many years, and this years version is really pushing towards the big vision. Pecha Kucha is a presentation style and an event format, Pecha Kucha Night, that is now held in over 260 cities globally, and still growing.

We have been involved with Pecha Kucha Night for a few years and have known the founders, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, since the beginning back in 2002. In 2009 our goal was to set Pecha Kucha for the expansion that it has already experienced and also what is still to come. The complete overhaul included an extensive redesign and an expansion to allow presentations to be viewed online with its own custom player via the presentations portal. It also saw a formalizing of the special event platform where one off Pecha Kucha events can be tied up with larger conferences or events and the integration of Creative Commons licensing on presentation content.

The new platform was soft-launched in late October, in time for Tokyo Design Week.

5. 100 Years of Life (client : Audi)

For Audi’s 100 year anniversary we put together two short documentaries and an exhibition at the Audi Forum Tokyo.

The documentaries featured two Japanese centenarians. Tateoka-san still plays the koto and we were able to arrange a special reunion for her family where she was able to meet her great grand-daughter (just a few months old) for the first time. 103 year old Shouchi-san still travels Japan and the world lecturing and holding workshops for both adults and children about how to live life well and stimulate your mind at both a young age and when you are in your later years.

For the exhibition we collaborated with photographer, Shouichi Ono, who specializes in photographing 100 year olds, to show the life and strength post 100years.

6. Easytone Pink Bomb (client : Reebok)

In one of our last projects of the year we put together a guerrilla campaign in bustling Ginza with the special pink Christmas edition of Reebok’s toning shoe, Easytone.

We assembled 100 women wearing the bright pink Reebok Easytone and coupled that with some promotional trucks and sample girls giving out present gift cards, all driving people to one of four stores in the area that stocked the shoes.

Even on a cold winter day, we made a lot of people take notice and managed to dominate the area with pink.

7. Pump Atmos Billboard (client : Reebok)

This is a fun, impactful billboard that we put together for the Atmos store in Harajuku for their special 20th Anniversary Reebok Pump collaboration shoe and the anniversary in general.

We wanted to make something a little tactile, so placed a great big three dimensional pump in the middle of the board and added shading on the billboard surface to make it look three dimensional.

8. Audi Live (client : Audi)

We created a live blogging platform for Audi press conferences so that a larger audience of press members could be reached.

The platform consists of a live updating page that is updated by someone at the event and a live video stream. The text portion is also directly updated to the Audi Japan Twitter account. Also on the page is a question form so reporters online can ask questions and receive a real time response, extending the press conference past the duration of the press event.

The innovative use of Twitter made news on TV Tokyo’s Morning Satelite, and featured our own Toyo Yokota.

9. Jetset UK, Claska (client : MINI)

To provide an impactful space for MINI at the Jetset UK event at Claska in Meguro, we created a massive 8m x 3.5m window sticker to make sure MINI put their stamp on this UK themed event.

To execute, we worked with a UK based photographer to get some original scenes from Mayfair (the namesake of one of the new release MINI models) in London, then put together a design utilizing the Union Jack flag and some Minis.

The design managed to dominate the main space of the event, providing a strong thematic element for the event and also present MINI well for attendees.

10. E-City (client : Expedia)

E-Cities was what we term a “passive game” that we launched all the way back in January 2009. The concept of a passive game is that the user just needs to sign up to get their page (their city in this case) and then doesn’t need to do anything other than get people to visit their page in order to play the game.

The more people that visit, the higher the population of your city and the more your city evolves and adds features and buildings. We featured Paris, New York and Honolulu as the key cities that you could grow.

We added some special giveaways as incentives to play the game. Visitors to the cities were rewarded with coupons for discounts on Expedia travel and hotels, while city owners had the chance to win the trip to their favorite city.

BONUS. New Office

Not really counting as a project, but quite significant to us for 2009 was the move to our new office in Harajuku. In our Shibuya office we were bursting at the seams, all in one room, some people even working off the meeting table. We spent more than 6 months on the lookout for new space before finally lucking out and discovering the gem of an office we have now in Harajuku.

Other than space and a great environment to work in, we are treated by working each day surrounded by the key people (young and fashionable) that we spend most of our time creating for. The only thing we have to worry about now is that we don’t fill up this office too

Other things

As I mentioned earlier, we had a lot more projects to be proud of in 2009 that couldn’t fit on the list, and for me personally, this past year of work speaks for the hard work that the whole team at USN has been putting in. As we are approaching our 3rd anniversary of the company, its incredibly satisfying to look back at the progress we have made. Especially in the face of trying times financially for the industry in general, we are very happy to have had our most successful year and have finished on an upswing.

2010 has a lot more in store and we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead.

If you want to follow updates about UltraSuperNew, you can follow us on Twitter at @ultrasupernew or just check out our website from time to time at http://ultrasupernew.com.

Today we launched Red Bull Crowdcast, which, as far as I know, is the first time a global brand has handed over the keys of live casting an event to the audience, allowing them to show their vision of the event in real time.

The idea sprang from looking at some of the ways that we share information today, the immediacy and the ease of it. Posting to your blog can be done by email, uploading to the cloud can be achieved with a simple iPhone App. Within the last coulpe of years we have progressed from storing all our images, text and videos on computers at home or at work, to storing and interacting with most of our media in shared environments online.

Here in Japan the primary way to share information is via the mobile phone. Even in a country where iPhone has a mere 1% market share (my estimate based on what I have heard on the street), data manipulation is mature and flat rate data plans mean that sending large files, images and videos is a reality, not a dream of what will be.

Instruction card handed out at the event to show users how to use Crowdcast

Taking these keys I came up with a concept that my team at USN has been wonderful in making into a reality. Based around Red Bull events (this time Red Bull Sound Clash), you can email your images to our special event email address and they are dropped into the event stream. Email on mobile phones in Japan has been a standard feature since the beginning and often acts as the primary email address for many Japanese people. It is a natural interface to participation. The time from sending your email to appearing on the stream can be as little as 5-10 seconds, so the reward for participation is almost immediate.

You can then watch the stream via the mobile or the PC websites allowing both people at the event and people sitting at home or at the office to tune in and watch the live images of the event come in real time.

What is most interesting to me, and what is so great about having a client like Red Bull who is willing to push some conventions, is how you can let your audience or consumer carry your voice. This is a scary thing for an established brand to do. Brands spend so much time protecting their image and attempting to control their public perception, that handing over some of that control can be scary indeed for an old school marketeer.

However, this really is just the continuation of an ongoing media evolution. Remember, it was once scary for newspaper websites to start accepting non-moderated comments on their articles. Today, it is expected and normal to have a public space to voice potentially opposing opinions.

What a brand can gain by taking this step is another level of mutual trust and respect I am working with my clients to achieve. By showing trust to your consumer, by telling them that their voice matters and responding to that voice, we can build a relationship with the consumer that has the potential to be closer and much more long lasting, but we also start a conversation that helps to learn about what satisfies our consumer.

Now, our little photo stream may not look like a place for social commentary, but what people send and the way they send it can teach us wonderful things about how we do our jobs as the ones attempting to fulfil their needs and wants.

You can check out Red Bull Crowdcast’s archive for Red Bull Sound Clash online, and also we plan to use it again at the upcoming Red Bull Box Cart Race where you can try it out yourself if you are able to get there on the day. For those interested in attending, the Red Bull Box Cart Race will be held at Odaiba’s Yumei-no-Ohashi in Tokyo on October 11th from 1pm.

1) Twitter

Yes, I have been on Twitter for more than the hiatus. But I want to be honest here, at some point around the end of last year as the world started to discover Twitter en-masse, as for many people, Twitter became such an easy method to update and communicate about news that I got a little lazy about going to the effort of writing full sentences and paragraphs and became sucked in by the immediacy of the Tweet.

2) Other projects

Lets call a spade a spade, I got busy.

In January I launched Retweetist, a Twitter Website that searched for all the retweets to determine trending topics, popular users and generally what people felt was worth repeating. This could probably have done with a post or two of my own, but being a Twitter project, I was blinded by the Twitter magic for getting the word out here.

My agency, UltraSuperNew Inc, has had an intense year. After picking up the Red Bull Japan account in October last year we have been busy and getting more and more involved, guzzling lots of Red Bull energy on the way. One of the highlights was the bicycle installation we made through the streets of Harajuku claiming to have borrowed parts of people’s bicycles. We got into a little trouble for that one, but the result made it worth while. We have picked up a number of interesting projects with Audi, including running live streaming of their press events and the new mobile website. And that’s just the start.

Press Army, a company that was birthed from a key need of UltraSuperNew to report on the success of social media activities, has now got legs. We launched it as an independent company just recently and have been growing that business very fast with some great new people on board, joining the talented team who has been behind it from the start.

3) A real world social life

Photo by susiviews

Looking past the tweets, status updates and general sharing of digital bits and pieces, I have managed a little more attention this year on exploring the world first hand. I have managed to visit about 8-10 new cities this year that I had never visited before, primarily across India and China — and most of those were not related to work!

I have also been cultivating a non-public life which I enjoy in that it is shared just with close friends and family. This is something I recommend everyone try to do. When we share things online, even on a closed connection with so-called “friend relationships”, I really consider this as a public forum. At some point a work colleague, a client or someone otherwise outside your central circle is going to be included into this platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, Mixi or whichever other service you might consider), so you may as well consider it public from the start… then at least there is a chance you keep the public embarrassments to a minimum. [note: I still have plenty of embarrassing moments captured online, so my method hasn't exactly been foolproof]

So, what does this return to the blogosphere mean?

As I have been distracted by the tweeting, the busyness and a private life, I have been slowly building up the urge to once again express myself in an expanded form online. The blog is the best way to achieve that result, and these days everything connects enough that I can push and pull content to and from other places that my presence can be maintained across the multiple networks without too much management time spent.

In my hiatus I experimented with Yongfook’s Sweetcron to try to merge all my streams of data. The software was a great idea and very neatly executed, but ultimately I found that I ended up with an unbalanced public page. When I mashed together Twitter, Blog posts, Flickr, Youtube etc, I ultimately ended up with a custom Twitter feed where if you were quick you might catch a glimpse of something else. Didn’t work for me.

On the other hand the progress that Wordpress has made recently (especially since version 2.8) has been very impressive. It has brought me back to the fold with auto-updates, auto-installs, widgets, more evolved CMS structure and lots of bug fixes that enable me to swiftly make updates and system changes.

So, I am back.

Taito asked us to take a mobile phone with “Chokkan Band”, a game that lets you play guitar and other instruments and have some fun. We decided the best way to do that was to get friend of USN, Shiri, some bright pink makeup, bad fitting clothes, and see where we could get away with playing Chokkan Band around Tokyo.

Here is a summary of what we got up to…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQbuE4EUxPQ

The highlight was making an invasion of the local bath house…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFr6-2HQFRg

But we also made it to a bunch of other locations…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oNHawBYlzE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDqadkP8oIw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICha-BJ0xQk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mEpC0yAN2w

Our two days running about town were a ton of fun. I hope you enjoy the videos.

The lucrative “girls who travel to Tokyo via Shinkansen (bullet train) in search of love” demographic is apparently on the rise and are now being catered to with their own magazine called Shinkansen&Love.

Shinkansen&Love website

Actually it has a lot more to do with fashion, but the concept is priceless. Check out the intro video and mini-site, you will get the idea.

However, I feel compelled to write this one just because using it encourages me to write about it.
I am writing my first post from my iPhone, so it is an appropriate time to make a mini review of the new Wordpress app for iPhone.

The Wordpress app is an application for writing posts to your Wordpress blog while on the go from your iPhone. It let’s you save your login name and password then you can get started editing or writing posts.

The good

The application was extremely easy to set up and configure. That was done in less than 1 minute after launching for the first time.

Composing a post was also very easy to get going with key fields just as you are used to in your regular wordpress interface.

Typing is as easy as using the iPhone keypad, which is easy for some, not so easy for others. For me it’s the fastest mobile input I have used.

Photos can be added directly from the phone by choosing from your photo library or taking a photo directly with the camera.

The bad

The first time I tested a post I saved a draft and tried previewing the post only to find that the system published a blank post live to my blog. Not exactly what was expected when previewing a draft.

Some of the things you can’t do include formating text with a WYSIWYG editor (although you can directly type HTML inthe post), anything involving special content in your blog and setting the position or size of your images.

Plugins that I miss include the Twitter one that auto-tweets when you publish and the Youtube widget. But both are not deal killers.

The other tricky thing with composing on the iPhone is the lack of copy-paste. This is not a limitation of the app but of the phone. It makes it pretty hard to link text in your post as many links are too long to type.

The conclusion

This is clearly going to be a great app for blogging live events… Expect to see a lot more live blogging of the next Stevenote than we already get. A quick release “take photo and blog it” workflow is going to be great for a lot of people.

You won’t stop using your regular wordpress interface but this will be a good one for getting those little posts out quickly on the run.

Now… Let’s see how this looks when I publish it.

(Note: this post was composed entirely on the iPhone app)
(Note2: the images seem to get dumped at the end of the post)

Perhaps partly because of the large number of personal diary blogs, the usage of entertaining blog widgets (often produced by brands for viral advertising) is probably at some of the highest levels in the world. For many its a great way to dress up what is often a very plain blog template and add a little of “this is what I like” factor.

These are my top 10…

10. Yamaha Pianica

Do you ever feel the need to play a musical instrument while browsing your friends’ blogs? This special blog widget lets you do just that.

9. Kiminchi no sauce

Bad coding joke or clever pun? You make the decision. Click the sauce bottle to see the page source.

ブログパーツで懸賞ゲット！ブログパーツの新しいカタチ FirstBuzz

8. Flipbook

For the artists we have a new outlet for your creative streaks. Flipbook gives you a web interface for you to draw successive frames of an animation and then plays them through your blog widget.

7. The Happening

This promotion for M. Night Shyamalan’s new film “The Happening” has some nice tricks to slowly deconstruct your blog piece by piece. The best way to understand what it is is to try it… click on the widget to see the effect.

6. Blog Level Up

The Japanese appetite for fantasy characters and role playing games hits the blog where this retro pixel avatar can level up on your blog. You can check your characters stats and add friends.

5. Maru Ten Ten = Star

Someone was thinking out of the box with this one. When clicked, the widget checks all of the text in the page, grabs all the dots in the text and darkens the screen to just highlight the dots. The effect is that your blog becomes like a night sky. The effect is even more powerful with Japanese text where you get varied sizes of stars from the big and small dots in the text.

NOTE : Doesn’t seem to work properly with Firefox 3.x, your text should fade out except for the dots.

4. Hoshi Toki no Toki

For the purely bizarre award, this blog widget takes the cake. Using a full page flash overlay, to display some animal characters full screen over your blog when you click on the insert. It changes animal over time and puts you in a nice mood for the blog avatar creator that it links to, KAOS.

3. Samurai Weapon

This blog widget promotion for Nintendo DS Game “Samurai Weapon”, is a bit subtle at first , but try clicking on the samurai character until he gets annoyed and be prepared to have your page killed in any number of samurai ways.

2. Uniqlock

Back in June 2007, the first release of the Uniqlock campaign for Uniqlo (Japanese casual wear clothing company) and this catchy blog widget that was at its core, managed to get the country buzzing. It is certainly one of the top of the most used blog widgets of all time. For this alone it deserves to be high on this list, but the execution with nice use of video and the rhythm of the clock was also very clean and the impact was almost universally positive. There have been a number of follow ups keeping the look evolving with new content, but basically the same concept. Music. Dance. Clock.

1. One Click Awards

This is the blog widget that got it all started for me. Made for the One Click Awards in 2007, it takes a cheeky premise of interaction with a little man who comes out of his widget and takes it to a new level by giving you a web ring tour with stops moving through video and pages alike. Come back after you are done ; )

UPDATE : Thanks Matt for reminding me about the 2kurabe blog widget… would have made the list if I had remembered it at the time. Nice website too. Select your preferred of two options… simple.

Recently we, as a collective internet populace, have become very good at republishing our comments, images, and other life streaming features to multiple platforms.

Our status updates are the most common, with Twitter (and for the early adopters, FriendFeed) being the easiest and most common to republish elsewhere. Some of the common places to push your updates to are the darlings of years past, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and of course the common blog to name a few. Most services offer a way to either push or pull these updates, so we tend to forget that when we speak in these micro mediums, we do not just speak to our friends on that stage, we speak across all our stages at once.

For me, I have all but forgotten Facebook, which stopped being interesting for me a while ago as it loaded up with applications that felt more like spam than fun. However, I still have my updates pushing there from Twitter, so for anyone who is a friend on Facebook and isn’t aware of my twitter account, it appears I am a very active Facebook status updater.

This is all well and good in that we have finally learned the lessons of write once, publish everywhere, which is surely one of the benefits of being digitally connected in this world. But what of the nature of this echo talk?

When I have my comments echoed to Facebook, the words are not written for Facebook, they just end up there. In fact, as I alluded to earlier, it is a place I often forget is even getting my updates. Without the targeted voice, we also stop listening to the responses and with this I start to see a weakness in the trend.

What we have is ghosts in the social networks, echoes of something that was said in another place being brought out of context.

Of course, FriendFeed has sought to rectify this to some extend by denoting the source of the information, setting itself up as the place to collect all your disparate conversations with the digital world. Google also has some strategies to clean up this fragmentation and duplication with Open Social and similar endevours to connect the disjointed networks with one framework. But those are the big bucket solutions, It is the trailing echoes in the networks that we no longer use that becomes the ghost.

Perhaps it is time that we stopped trying to talk to everyone (as pro-blogger Jason Calacanis has pledged to do recently), and concentrate on talking to the few important ones. The social capacities of the internet have opened us up to more new connections than we will ever need (and many that we didn’t want in the first place), but it is a seriously powerful tool for passing new information, which we now see at close to real time, and the concept of public sharing over commercialism seems to be gaining momentum at the individual level as a result.

I can deal with echoes and ghosts for the time being, as long as I give pointers to where I really exist, but the validity of various platforms seems to wane now based not on the number of accounts, but by the number of users who use it to keep up with their contacts. It becomes our telephone address book (and in some cases really becomes our telephone address book) for the 21st century.

There have been a lot of discussions recently about ways to construct a distributed micro-blogging environment. Dave Winer triggered a conversation on distributed storage and distribution of Twitter but all the consensus amounted to was a lot of chatter about clever ways to backup your Twitter feeds to recover when Twitter goes down.

For me this doesn’t directly address the problem. It fixes Twitter uptime issues to some extent, but that is not a solution for the masses, it is a solution for the elite who can realise that this is an issue to think about in the first place. Most users will use something or not, they are not looking for ways to retrofit a service.

Elsewhere Mike Warot compares centralised internet services to silos and makes a convincing argument for using centralised services. The comparison to silos is made to discuss the need for specialists and specialised equipment to keep your grain/data safe. I agree. But another thing that makes our grain/data safe is having multiple silos. Mike’s argument only sells me on the aspect having properly supported infrastructure and technicians but I want to be able to choose the silo that doesn’t sit in the path of the tornado (continuing with his metaphor).

As mentioned in much of this discussion, the structure of micro-blogging (and we can use Twitter as the base model) can be its own data structure, not so dissimilar to RSS. There are a few different types of information that need to be requested, but surely they are all easily rendered with XML…. but something a little bit more clever to handle the unique nature of the exchange.

As it turns out, as I have been writing this post, Michael Arrington released a very nice piece outlining how Twitter could be opened up technically based on what a bunch of smart people who know about this kind of thing have been talking about. It demonstrates a viable system utilising XMPP that can push messages to clients rather than having to continually check for updates. This need to continuously check for new data is what was widely regarded as the biggest obstacle for an open Twitter-like platform.

As soon as someone does the work to get an open platform running, does that mean the end for Twitter and its hefty status as the “next best thing”?

Very likely “yes”.

The brand of Twitter will still more than likely continue but you have to think that the number of roll-your-own micro-blogging platforms will boom and eventually most of the micro-blogging for the bulk of normal users (as opposed to the geek centric Twitter users of today) will collect around the use of open micro-blogging from the big guys … Google, MSN, Mixi (for the Japanese users), Yahoo (if the shareholders don’t tear it to shreds).

Japan has really only just got started with Twittering if what we hear from Twitter Japan is true, which implies that micro-blogging is well suited to a Japanese market. The heavy use of mobile phones for accessing the internet (100million mobile users vs 85million PC users) and the heavy affinity for blogging (Japanese is the most popular blogging language in the world) would all point to a boom about to hit Japanese shores once the mainstream gets a hold of it.

Counter to support of an open platform is the reluctance to get too heavily involved with open source projects (mostly due to language difficulties)… which brings us back to Twitter Japan. The people behind Twitter Japan are Digital Garage, who have been very successful in bringing foreign web assets into the Japanese market. One of the projects that they very successfully brought in was Movable Type,… yes, an open source project. While the rest of the world moves heavily towards Word Press, Japan uses Movable Type more often than not.

Chances are the Digital Garage would be the best ones to bring such an open micro-blogging platform into a Japanese market that has some reluctance to adopt foreign projects without their hand held, but they of course have other motives with the Twitter relationship well established.

The question I have been thinking about is, “When (yes, that’s a when, not if) an open micro-blogging platform is established, will Twitter follow?”. I think the boom Japanese use of Twitter implies that Japan will have a lot to say about that.

Second question, “Does it matter?” … will Twitter be over-run by everyone else or will they have time to have  the market controlled by the time an alternative is available.

I am looking forward to finding out the answers.