Japan — Popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter Inc. is forging alliance with Mixi, Japan’s largest native social network, the partnership that could further development of products, advertising opportunities, as well as expand the San Francisco micro-blogging other business reach in that country, and to strengthen their base against a rapidly expanding rival Facebook.
Twitter unfurled a Japanese edition, the company’s first non-English language version, in 2008, and Japan is emerging as one of Twitter’s most active countries.
For Twitter, the association with a local social network could direct to a new strategy as the San Francisco-based micro-blogging service explores to accelerate global growth. Japan is the company’s second-biggest market after the US and has served as a key international testing ground of sorts.
Japan country manager for Twitter Inc. James Kondo, left, and mixi Inc. founder and President Kenji Kasahara shakes hands at a joint press conference in Tokyo Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011. The two announced Twitter and Japan’s biggest homegrown social networking site mixi joined forces Wednesday to strengthen their ground against a rapidly expanding Facebook. Photo: Tomoko Hosaka / AP
According to Asiajin, the two companies have already rolled out their first joint-product together is “Mixi-Xmas 2001” a Christmas-themed application that allows both Mixi users to share holiday messages on both platforms and send “social gifts” to friends, including hashtags. The companies plan to further collaborate on products for other seasonal events as well.
“We will continue to explore other opportunities to offer great services to Mixi and Twitter users in the future,” said Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner.
Mixi-Twitter joint Christmas app
Mixi has a reported 22 million users, while Twitter touts about 16 million.
Japan was Twitter’s first foreign language platform, and it opened its first overseas office in Tokyo earlier this year. In fact, several Twitter traffic records sprang up in Japan, including tweets sent after the quake and tsunami disaster in March, when social media provided lifelines of critical information at a time when normal lines of communication were disrupted.
According to the Associated Press, the executives from the two companies began discussing after the disaster.
The micro-blogging network in particular and social media giant Facebook both gained prominence in Japan after the earthquake. New users swarmed to the site for real-time information about the nuclear crisis, electricity blackouts and aftershocks.
“Had our services been connected during the disaster, we would have been able to provide much better service for our users,” Kasahara said at a joint news conference at Mixi headquarters in Tokyo.
The seven-year-old Tokyo-based organization had been the dominant social networking platform in Japan. In spite of its enormous popularity elsewhere in the world, Facebook failed to make much of an impact in the country. That is, until this year.
Twitter and Mixi both said that they will also collaborate together to provide communication enabling services during emergencies and disasters, but do not appear to have plans to work together on an everyday basis, reports The Next Web.
Kondo said he is not aware if Twitter would sign similar association in other countries. But the company is keen to see what happens with the experiment, which launched with a limited Christmas-themed application, he said.
“This is going to be an interesting case,” he told The Associated Press. “We are going to see what works and what does not work, and we are going to build on top of that as opposed to throwing out something that may not work.”
For Mixi, the announcement could not have come at a better time.
Twitter and Mixi said they both offer contrasting-and mutually beneficial-services. While Twitter is a public platform with real-time information, whereas Mixi is a closed network. Most users limit their networks to a small group of their closest friends.
Moreover, Mixi confident that by partnering with Twitter, it can better integrate public information and conversation into its tight-knit communities.
“Mixi rightly had a choice to do it themselves or partner with someone who is good at this,” Kondo said. “And we are glad that they thought that Twitter would be a good partner. I think we can provide value that is distinctive.”
According to Nielsen NetRatings Japan, Mixi had 8.4 million unique visitors in October, but the company that once dominated social networking in Japan fell to third place this year behind Twitter, with 14.5 million unique users, and Facebook, with 11.3 million visitors.