Japan’s behemoth social network service Mixi has launched its microblogging service “Mixi Echo” for a limited time.
The page introducing the new twitter-like one-line comment service is featured on the “information from Mixi” section. The guide page,
says that this service is for limited time only until September 1st.
If you turn on the Mixi Echo, it will be shown at the best location at the top of your home page,
The five latest messages from your Mixi friends (known as “mai-miku”) are shown after the input box. You can also click through to the archive pages to see the past messages, 25 messages per page.
The message length limit is 150 letters, which is 10 letters longer than Twitter in roman alphabets. More than double for Japanese letters as Twitter’s limtation is 140 “bytes” instead of “letters”. Long URL is not “tinyurlized”.
# update: Twitter now supports multi-bytes letters count. My mistake.
Mobile site viewing and emoji (special drawing letters set provided by three major cellularphone-carieers) are supported, the same as for other Mixi services.
Mixi has grown along with its blog service. You can limit access to your blog entries to your friends or to friends and friends of friends, but with Mixi Echo your messages can be viewed by anyone who can find your profile page.
Twitter is the most popular microblogging service in Japanese (and worldwide), followed by wassr (English version), which recently became popular among web teckies due to Twitter and Twitter API problems. Microblogging services have only been popular among net savvy people to date, but Mixi and their 14 million users have the potential to bring microblogging to the masses if the service gets a good response during this one month trial.
Thanks for the report.
Releasing it for 1 month has to be a marketing trick, no? (As well as a chance to cancel the service if it’s not popular and make changes). They may suspend it a while, but they will surely bring it back if it is popular and this ‘come-back’ will have additional marketing value. Very clever.
I hope someone finds a way for Twitter updates to automatically be posted to your Mixi profile. I guess it would have to be a hack, as they don’t have an API, right?
This “Twitter” function must be a big change so they seems awkward to introduce it to all 14 million users directly. If most users of Mixi Echo are geeks who want to try, it can be just ceased after seeing troubles. My 2 yen.
Mixi is very conservertive about API, though they often talked about the “possibilities” to stockholders. My impression is, they try to hold developers attention with the possibility, but never opened them really until their dominance will be in jeopardy.
No “Official” API but drikin (who made a popular MacOSX twitter client twitterpod) made his Mixi Echo version EchoPod
http://blog.drikin.com/article/104203970.html [J]
There may be other client developers follow, if Mixi Echo will last longer than 1 month.
can some body invite me to mixi , i really looking for this since a year but not able to get it.
I would be really greatfull , if somebody invite me to get me in.
Thanks
Hi Kampuro，
Mixi opened its registration system last year so now you should be able to register by yourself, no invitation required. You need to use Japanese feature cellphones(No iPhone/Android/Blackberry) to be identified by Mixi, and that also means you should be inside Japan.