Los Angeles — In its quest to cater more people in the Japanese market, popular micro-blogging site Twitter early this week announced that it has forged a new and somewhat unexpected partnership with Yahoo Japan that will allow Yahoo customers to see real-time Twitter results integrated with search results, according to a blog post (in both English and Japanese) on Twitter’s blog.
“We are thrilled to announce that Tweets will be integrated into various services on Yahoo! Japan, beginning with real-time results pages,” the micro-blogging giant revealed Tuesday.
As part of the alliance Twitter says that “This collaboration will allow Twitter content to reach even more users in Japan, one of our biggest international markets.”
Moreover, the real-time content will help Twitter become even more available to one of the micro-blogging service’s massive international markets. Twitter spoke on their hopes of the partnership in a recent blog post:
According to a report from Tech Crunch, this announcement potentially touts a bigger deal than most realize, as Twitter encounters a rapidly large number of users in Japan — a nation that already enjoys a great relationship with Twitter and has worked most closely since their inception.
Interestingly, it was Twitter’s Japanese growing population that was responsible for the world record of tweets per second, which was set at 6,939 TPS shortly after New Year’s Eve. Also, it was Japanese graphic designer who posted the 20 billionth tweet. They have also been embracing the service as a source of important information. After the earthquakes, the nuclear power plant company that faced a meltdown joined Twitter to post updates about the status of the power plant.
“Twitter’s goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them,” Twitter wrote on its Japanese blog. “We believe that a partnership with a strong web platform such as Yahoo Japan will help us fulfill this mission for the Twitter Japan community.”
Since Japan is such an important market for Twitter, it makes sense to see these types of partnerships popping up. News of the just forged partnership between Twitter and Yahoo Japan comes on the heels of Twitter’s recently announced deal with the largest mobile operator in Japan, NTT DOCOMO, to help bring the service to more people.
Also, Twitter unleashed a Japanese version of the site back in April 2008 after noticing many Japanese users on the English version of the site. Despite Twitter’s rapidly growing users in Japan it still has not beaten out Mixi, which has a Twitter like feed, as the country’s leading social network.
According to comScore, Japan is one of the top five countries in the world for Twitter penetration, with 16.8% reach dwarfing the global average of 7.4%. Apparently, a partnership such as this would place the service on enough Web properties to convince users to migrate.