Martyn: Microblogging service Twitter launched a new mobile site just for Japan on Thursday as it tries to make in-roads into the country. Well the two thirds of Japan’s 91 million internet users get online via their cellphones, 8 million of them exclusively confirms. The Twitter’s previous mobile sites are Generic Ones for users worldwide doesn’t work well on some Japanese handsets. The new site is intended to correct that.
Kevin: I think the exciting things that you’re gonna see when everyone starts using it hopefully is that all the feature functionality that works on hopefully the entire range of phones that everyone here in Japan has is totally accessible favoriting App Reply, setting your preferences on each and everyone of the browsers on all the carriers is the goal.
Martyn: It also includes at least one new feature.
Kevin: Exciting new features that actually we have never launched in any other part of the world such as emoji.
Martyn: Emoji or emoticons are popular on cellphone websites and email in Japan. So the introduction will be welcome by some users.
Shinji: [Foreign language – subtitled] I think emoji could be important. My messages and those from other users are clearly laid out so the interface is easy to use.
Martyn: Many of those at the launch party were toting iPhones but the new site is aimed towards spreading Twitter to the average cellphone user. It appeared popular at least on Thursday night but came in for criticism because it had difficulty keeping up with the load.
Katsura: I love it. Very useful and very visible it’s good. This is now the best.
Martyn: The size of fail wale made multiple appearances on first here on the launch but conditions steadied after the event was over. Co-founder, Biz Stone, flew in to launch this site. He also spoke about what mobile means to Twitter.
Biz: Japan is obviously very advanced in mobile and so we get, it’s a unique opportunity to kind of see how the mobile users in Japan are using Twitter, right? I mean because they’re, it’s very advanced. So, and it’s also a test for us for, you know, the Asian market because it’s crucially very hard to localize in Asian languages. It’s harder than French, Italian, German, and Spanish which we are gonna be doing actually in the coming months, yeah. So, you know, it’s largely experimental but it’s also a lot of fun.
Martyn: In Tokyo, this is Martyn Williams, IDG News Service.
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