The Japanese site is a partnership between Twitter and Digital Garage, and it is Twitter in Japanese but with display ads.Techcrunch reports that that there is already a Japanese buzz around Twitter with people using the English version, so it could be huge.What's most interesting though is the ads. Twitter has been like Facebook in its early days -- ad free -- but as the service grows it will have to pay for itself and people will want to make money out of it.The Twitter blog calls the ads "commercial experimentation" and, at launch, visitors to Twitter.jp will see media from two clients. One is a new book about Twitter being released in Japan, another is an automotive news service built on Twitter and sponsored by Toyota.That isn't the only ad experimentation going on. Techcrunch again the other day reported that following a major outage users were spotting ads in their Twitter stream during the service difficulties. Clearly developers were playing around and broke it, revealing what the wizard was up to... OK rubbish metaphor, the wizard was testing ads, suggesting a rollout is on the way. Japan is only more confirmation of that. It's always Japan, don't ask me why.Like Facebook, Twitter looks like it is about to grow up. Will it be snapped up at the same time? Good question. There must be a lot of people looking it over, but as they do they are asking themselves on question at the same time -- can it go the distance/does it have a future?It's a good one. Don't know the answer, but am quite enjoying this renewed interest in it.We are at, as Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC blogged the other day, at the tipping point. I mean we must be, because he was talking about it on the Today programme.I think he was right when he said that Twitter is not really going to spread in the way Facebook does. It won't, it's different. I don't know how different it is, but clearly its appeal to geeks and the so-called digerati is strong.It will be interesting to see what happens next advertising and all.
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Gordon Macmillan
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