Japan is next

Jan 17, 2008 10:44 GMT  ·  By

There's been an announcement of "Twitter in Japan" posted on the product's official blog and it had the Asian country's users fired up over it ever since yesterday, the time the news hit the Internet.

"To support continued growth in Japan, Twitter has formed a partnership with Digital Garage to create the official Twitter Japan service. As part of this arrangement, Digital Garage has made an investment in Twitter, Inc and will commit engineering and other development resources to help us bring Twitter to Japan," BIZ wrote on the blog. As good as this might sound, the recent problems that the service encountered recently that culminated with a total failure during the Steve Jobs keynote speech he held at the Macworld Expo.

Perhaps the money should better be invested in making Twitter more stable and more reliable, as Duncan Riley of TechCrunch.com suggested. The failure mentioned above is just the last one in a series of downtimes that its users have encountered during the past 12 months, most likely caused because of the ever growing number relying on it to let their loved ones know their status.

In case you haven't heard of Twitter before and don't know what got Japan stirred up, it's a messaging service that answers one very simple question: "What are you doing?" It's there for everyone to see what you want them to know you are up to. If your mom keeps nagging you with "have you eaten" questions, just make it say that you are currently doing just that and that'll make both of you happy.

Privacy is pretty important to the Twitter people, so nobody is followed 24/7. Users can set quiet times to prevent unwanted interruptions. As the homepage says, this service "becomes a modern antidote to information overload." If you're going there and thinking about using it, Iterasai!