Japan’s popular girls idol corps AKB48 announces with Google that all of its members opened Google+ page today December 8. Google Japan cooperates to set up a special page you can browse all, or by AKB48 and its sister-groups.
[Update] Nikkei reports [J] that this is a collaboration project between AKB48 and U.S. Google. According to it, the contents will be translated into 5 languages, English, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Indonesian. Video chat sessions with fans will happen on Google+ Hangout. (though the special page only exists in Japanese, as far as I tried to find.)
[Update 2011-12-09] Popular members of AKB48 are now most influential Google+ users after a day.
AKB48 is one of very few successful music sellers under the current Japanese slump of music business, by selling many of the same CD to one fan in exchange of hand-shaking-rights and other prizes.
Tokyo-based AKB48, Osaka-based NMB48, Nagoya-based SKE48 members belong to sub-categories. There are new HKT48 from Kyushu, JKT48 in Jakarta, Indonesia and TPE48 in Taiwan. Each group also has some trainees and it is not known how many members totally exist in the whole group. Probably a few hundreds. [Update] about 260 girls! [J] (HT to @koyhoge)
AKB48 recently started the Internet connection service. Of course they have iOS/Android apps as well.
[Update] press conference highlight is on YouTube.
See also:
Some AKB48 hit songs on their YouTube official channel.
