Hatena Inc., USA subsidiary of Hatena Corp, one of the web-geek community center in Japan, released its Hatena Haiku‘s English version today.
It’s clearly influenced by microblogging platforms like twitter, but adds its own unique functionality. One is the drawing tool on comment forms, where users can post messages via handwriting. Another community oriented feature is keyword-based message thread, which let users do category based chat.
Hatena is known for their keyword handling and link building to encourage its member community building. They are thought of an engineer-centric web company in Japan, some even says they are the Japanese Google, though their success has yet to expand beyond the tech community to regular users. Recently, president Jun’ya Kondo himself moved to the Bay Area and established US subsidiary for their service globalization. Famous Japanese Web2.0 evangelist Mochio Umeda is a board member as well.
