Following yesterday’s news that Japan’s mobile social gaming giant GREE now hit 21.25 million users, our very own Akky Akimoto has done some research and created the graph you can see above for his Japanese blog. And as you can see, in Japan’s “social services” realm, Mixi (“Japan’s Facebook”), GREE and Mobage-town (another huge mobile social gaming platform) are head-to-head regarding user numbers.

Here’s the breakdown:

GREE (21.25 million members at the end of July 2010) – via the latest financial report [PDF]

Mixi (21.02 million members at the end of July 2010) – via the latest financial report [PDF]

Mobage-town (20.48 million members in July 2010) – via DeNA’s latest monthly report [PDF]

Twitter (5 million+ members in February 2010) – via CNET Japan

Facebook (1.33 million members currently) – via CheckFacebook.com

Digital Garage, the Tokyo-based company that runs Twitter’s Japan operations, doesn’t disclose newer numbers. But given the incredible hype over the service in Japan in recent months, the current number of users should be much, much higher.

What’s also interesting to note is that Yahoo Japan, the nation’s biggest website, says it had 24.11 million active user IDs in July 2010.

Hangame Japan, the Korean online game giant (background on its position in Japan), last summer disclosed it even had 32.39 million accounts (needless to say, this number has to be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s much easier to register multiple times on Hangame than on GREE or Mobage-town).

CyberAgent’s Ameba has ten million registered members. Most of the members are blogging on the platform, but it’s also possible to sign into Ameba’s virtual world Ameba Pigu (which had a respectable four million users [PDF] in June) with an Ameba account or use their Twitter clone Ameba Now.

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Serkan Toto

Dr. Serkan Toto is a German based in Tokyo. Like us, he is passionate about introducing Japanese IT to the rest of the world. Full-time, Serkan works as an independent web industry consultant for hedge funds, venture capital companies and start-ups worldwide. He is also a writer for mega tech blog network TechCrunch, covering Japan-related technology and web trends. This is Serkan's website. Follow Serkan on Twitter here.

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