Mixi testing their “Twitter”
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.
Author Information Akky Akimoto is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. As an individual he writes for Asiajin and his own Japanese weblog. He also produces web services including IvRead.com and Narabe.com. Twitter @akky 20 Responses to “Mixi testing their “Twitter””
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No way can this be an invite-only “Friends Of Someone” type gathering. No one must be able to say they weren’t allowed to come. Anyway that’s the idea. What do you think?? Update: After saying most of the development is happening in North Americawordof a Japanese Twitter-like service just popped on TechMeme. August 4th, 2008 | Posted in Technology |
15 Desktop Blogging Tools ReviewedRB | Week 13 OpenSocial Video Tutorials and Educational VideosMashable! OpenSocial is Google’s developer platform for social networking applications. It’s the backbone behind (tovább)Mixi testing their “Twitter”AsiajinJapan’s behemoth social network service Mixi has launched its microblogging service “Mixi Echo” (tovább)
skriver Asiajin. Jeg har selv aktiveret den på min Mixi-profil, og den virker fint og ser godt ud. Desværre er den indtil videre kun på prøve, men jeg håber, at den kommer til at fungere i længere tid end til 1. september, som er skæringsdatoen for
type gathering. No one must be able to say they weren’t allowed to come. Anyway that’s the idea. What do you think?? Update: After saying most of the development is happening in North Americawordof a Japanese Twitter-like service just popped on TechMeme. Source:Micro-blogging meetup in September? Posted in General |
No way can this be an invite-only “Friends Of Someone” type gathering. No one must be able to say they weren’t allowed to come. Anyway that’s the idea. What do you think?? Update: After saying most of the development is happening in North Americawordof a Japanese Twitter-like service just popped on TechMeme. 8/4/2008; 7:40:30 PM
About Mixi Mixi is four years old, has a strong mobile component, lots of privacy and is available only in Japanese. Job hunting is big on the site. It isexperimenting with a Twitter-like systemfor commenting and other communication. Google Maps Japan includes a button on search results pages to embed maps on Mixi profiles. It’s by far the biggest social network in Japan. TechCrunch ran a good
About Mixi Mixi is four years old, has a strong mobile component, lots of privacy and is available only in Japanese. Job hunting is big on the site. It isexperimenting with a Twitter-like systemfor commenting and other communication. Google Maps Japan includes a button on search results pages to embed maps on Mixi profiles. It’s by far the biggest social network in Japan. TechCrunch ran a good
applications are solving these challenging problems from folks from Wassr (one of the largest micro blogging serive in Japan) and Mixi (the largest social networking service in Japan), who had recently began experimenting with micro blogging called “mixi Echo”. If you’re interested in the architecture of mixi Echo, you can take a look here (the actual number of servers are much more).
No way can this be an invite-only “Friends Of Someone” type gathering. No one must be able to say they weren’t allowed to come. Anyway that’s the idea. What do you think?? Update: After saying most of the development is happening in North Americawordof a Japanese Twitter-like service just popped on TechMeme. 8/4/2008; 7:40:30 PM
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?
[...] Via Asiajin. [...]
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.
[...] sociala japoneza Mixi a lansat propriul serviciu de microblogging gen twitter pentru o perioada [...]
[...] After saying most of the development is happening in North America word of a Japanese Twitter-like service just popped on [...]
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.
[...] users stay longer in Mixi, making it much more successful and profitable. <Related posts> http://asiajin.com/blog/2008/08/04/mixi-testing-their-twitter/ http://xorsyst.com/japan/mixi-echo/ <Takuya Homma> [...]
[...] and even Mixi, the largest SNS in Japan introduced Twitter clone function for trial named “Mixi Minna no Echo“. CNET Japan interviewd to Evan Williams how he think about it and he answered [...]
[...] component, lots of privacy and is available only in Japanese. Job hunting is big on the site. It is experimenting with a Twitter-like system for commenting and other communication. Google Maps Japan includes a button on search results pages [...]
[...] social network service Mixi [J, registration required], who had started in-service microblog Mixi Echo since last summer, renamed it with Mixi Voice and made it as an “official” [...]