Tweeting isn’t for everyone. Not me, mind you. Friends of mine can probably agree with me that I thoroughly enjoy the service, allowing a ridiculous amount of gobbledy-gook to random flow from my insane cerebrum to the INTARWUBS. All of the Guys tweet. SeriouslyGuys, our website, has even gained machine sentience and tweets. It seems like it might take a lot longer for Japan at large though, as a recent survey by the iBridge monitor group revealed that just 2.6% of Japanese people ever used Twitter (current and in the past) and only 16% even know what it is. Of those who used the service, more than two-thirds reported having at least four followers.
Given how much Japan uses its cellphones, I’d have thought Twitter to be an almost immediate hit, since it can direct messages via SMS (lamest use of Twitter, though-iPhone FTW). Plus, with kanji, one can say a lot more in 140 characters. Then again, Japanese also have an unparalleled level of mobile net access. Do they have a problem with reading all the messages from the bottom up? Perhaps they have something better that they’ve been using all along?