The largest mobile social network Gree announced [J] that their new GREE Connect (tentative name) platform starting this April 2010.

Mixi Appli, an OpenSocial specification based API was officially introduced [J] on the biggest social network Mixi in August 2009 after a half year closed beta.

Mobage Town by DeNA, the second mobile social network also started [J] their OpenSocial API and game API opened to third party developers in September 2009. As Mobage Town (Gree as well) is the mobile centric service, they implemented Open Social API on the limited Japanese cellphone browsers well.

After the phrase "Mixi Tsukare"(tiresome on Mixi) was said by some long term users and growth slowed, Mixi's traffic was reported to ride on upstream trend again by their Mixi Appli.

Now, all three competing social network services (none of them has been getting the dominating position if you imagine No.1 is like Facebook in many countries) can tell their developer users that they can make and possibly earn on their platform, instead of learning Facebook platform, which is not predictable to worth supporting in Japanese market at this point. The level of openness and seriousness are different among those big three, but they need to show their fighting pose against Facebook invasion.

Author Information  @akky(Akky AKIMOTO) is one of the first pro-bloggers in Japan [J]. He also leads Asiajin, writes for Japan Times, does consultation for foreign companies interested in entering Japanese web market.

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