Mixi, Japan’s largest Facebook-type social network service, today announced that they would change their ashiato(footprint) service from June 13th.

Mixi’s footprint is a feature to show you which your network friend browsed your page (profile, diary, photo, etc.) at how many seconds/minutes ago.

By this, Mixi in early days acquired users stickiness, by making polite Japanese users worried, like “oh, my friend A read my diary 5 minutes ago, I will be impolite if I will not leave footprint on her page”.

Also, after the East Japan Earthquake, this footprint worked well for people to check if their not-so-serious friends had come back online.

The release said that the feature will be remodeled to “the last week visitors” list, less real-time. Here is the sample image of the planned new page.

Mixi explains that footprint is not so important nowadays as some of Mixi features like Mixi Voice (microblog) does not mark footprints, and Mixi Iine(Like) covers some light communications with your friends. But I can not see why they have to make it less real-time at this point.

This kind of change must cause lots of refusal responses if it was done, say in 2005, however, I have not observed them both in Mixi or outside.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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Nintendo [J] started Twitter this morning at 9:08 a.m., June 6th (Japan Standard Time).

There were two tweets pointing today’s releases on their website, E3 2011 conference information notice [J] and a bug info of a race game Ridge Racer 3D [J]

The bio section tells “We are going to give notifications and website updates info from Nintendo. We are afraid that we will not answer your inquiries”. It does not sound that this account will tweet anything human-touch.

Nintendo America (@nintendoamerica) has been tweeting actively, but the Japanese HQ were not so keen on social media.

[Update] The 3rd tweet at 1:02 a.m. 7th (JST) was sent by Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo (Wikipedia). He wrote,

“Hello, everyone. I am Iwata from Nintendo. I have been in L.A. since Saturday to prepare for E3. I am going to make a few guest tweets per day only during E3. Yoroshiku-onegai-shimasu #Iwata_E3″

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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The largest it industry conference by invitation, Infinity Ventures Summit[J] was held at Sapporo in May 26th and 27th. Among many sessions, the most surprising topic came out from the mouth of Isao Moriyasu, the executive of DeNA who promised to be the next CEO in the end of June.

DeNA has been released series of games titled with the word “royal” proceeding after the launch of their first successful in-house social game “Kaitou Royal” (English title is “Bandit Nation”. Although being really successful in Japan, Bandit Nation closed on August 31, 2010).

Those games have same common denominators as a series, do missions, battle against other players, and collect treasures. All Royal titles has been achieved more than 1 billion yen ( 12 hundred million US dollars ) sale per month.

Ninja Royal is the latest royal series released for Android smartphone. Moriyasu announced they started to develop this title with only 3 staffs at the beginning; 1 planner for full time, one another planner partially working on this project, and 3 engineers. 2 out of 3 engineers were new graduates. Then they added 2 more engineers later and released this title within 6 months.

This is an incredible case representing well how DeNA is running a highly profitable business.

Tags: Japan by Hiroumi Mitani
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