Major Japanese mobile gaming social network GREE has taken a significant step yesterday: it’s now possible [PDF] for third parties to release games on the site (the move was announced back in January). Before, GREE offered its almost 20 million users self-developed titles only, meaning the company doubled as a platform and content provider.

It will still do in the future, but seeing the list of around 40 titles the 30 companies GREE was able to attract from the get-go, I’d say users can expect a huge boost not only in game quantity but also quality.

Sega, for example, is providing Tenma Taisen, a “social battle” game that can be played with up to 100 friends simultaneously (see screenshots below).

Namco Bandai offers Ridge Racer For G, a social racing game (see screenshots below).

Here’s a screenshot of Game Studio Monogatari, a game made by Drecom that simulates life in a gaming company.

GREE says it will collect payments from users (for virtual in-game items) and split profits with third parties. With its decision to open the platform, it follows competitors Mixi and Mobage-town who took the plunge last year.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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The original is here by @emeruzwei @seagetch

[Update] The drawing was done by another person. The link to the image is fixed, too.

[Update 2010-07-20] Greasemonkey script to replace the real Fail Whale to this image for Firefox/Opera/Chrome by Smellman

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Somehow Twitter catches on so much in Japan. Like Japanese tweets recorded on national team soccer game on the World Cup 2010 4 days ago.

Following the majority is one of the national character where social accordance is valued. Then, weird things are happening by people who are not necessary to get on the bandwagon.

Japanese exercise magazine Tarzan [J] suggests a short training “Mobile Tsubuyaki Yoga”(Tsubuyaki means Tweet in Japanese). By it, you can train your body trunk with tweeting, as explained on the right side-note.

The top one is “Wood pose”. It tells, “Stand upright, turn one side of your knee outside, stamp your under thigh with your foot. Stretch up the opposite side’s arm with your palm facing inside. Handle Movatwi(=MovaTwitter) with the other hand. 30 seconds each.”

Emi, who took the photo wrote her impression on the image, “Doukashiteru”(Crazy). Totally Agreed!

via @amachang

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Japan’s biggest social network Mixi (which crossed the 20 million member mark in April) may have just found yet another way to expand its user base and boost engagement. Mixi yesterday introduced a new function that makes it possible to find colleagues from your company on the site and befriend them.

Background:
Unlike Facebook and other social networks outside Japan, most members use nick names and no face pictures on their profiles (using your real name isn’t required anywhere on the site). In other words, if you want to i.e. re-connect with your old high-school friend, it’s much harder to do than, say, on Facebook (Mixi provides a special tool to overcome that particular problem).

Another point worth mentioning is that Japan doesn’t have a single business social network like LinkedIn that ever reached a critical mass.

Mixi says the new company search is ideal for those members wishing to connect with colleagues to have lunch, do sports or drink with. After befriending your colleagues, you can share photos or your Mixi calendar with them in a sort of “LinkedIn light” environment (friends you made this way will be hidden from your “non-professional” contacts).

Even though just entering the name of your company is enough to start (another company called Teikoku provided the database), actually getting through to individuals seems to be much harder in my test (I entered “???” (GREE) to try the new function out).

Here’s how a sample “LinkedIn light” within Mixi looks like (click to enlarge):

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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Japan’s upper house election campaign period began on 24th June.

Internet updates during election has been banned in Japan. It was a discussion to legalize blog updates (but not Twitter, funny how they tried to draw line between them) recently, but it could not make this time in time.

According to J-Cast [J], incumbent upper house member Kenzo Fujisue, who is also known by his active tweets, keeps that rule and stopped tweeting “texts”, but tweet URLs.

Those tweets, few to ten per day, point to third party Twitter service TweetMic, on where you can record voice message.

The Public Office Electian Law Act 142 says that the distribution of documents and drawings besides standard brochures are prohibited. This is applied to online documents like blog entries or tweets.

However, “voice” is not included in the “documents and drawings”, which he consulted both with his layer and MIC(Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). So he posts only URLs (which is an address to another location on the web, not a “documents”) and his followers can click to listen his latest speech during campaign period.

His voice messages are very short, few sentences within a minute. The messages are like, which prefecture he rounded that day, he visited 10 places in another prefecture another day, what he ate on breakfast at hotel, national soccer team’s win on World Cup, etc.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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