There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn't particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.
It's likely that Twitter will roll out English ads at some point. The site has no other source of revenue. But whenever you roll out an ad-free service and then start placing display ads on the interface, people will complain. So it's probably a smart move to include advertisements from the get go in Japan.
In other news, an apparent Twitter privacy breach turned out to be a bit of a false alarm. But only a bit. Blogger and Twitter user Orli Yakuel discovered that many of her Twitter direct messages, which were supposed to be private communications between two users, were showing up on her public timeline. This is basically the same thing as posting your private emails on your blog. Not good.
It turns out that Twitter probably wasn't responsible. Rather, Orli was testing a new service called GroupTweet, and entered her account info instead of setting up a new account. But this raises another issue. There are a huge number of third party tools for Twitter. And many require you to enter your login information. While we've been pretty happy to do this in the past, figuring the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we'd delete our account, the possibility of our private messages being made public hadn't really occurred to us. There really needs to be a better way for third party applications to access your Twitter data without requiring your username and password.
A few months back we realized that we don't know Kentucky from Kansas thanks to Statetris, an online game that combines geography with Tetris. At the time, all we could do is bungle the placement of US states. But now that Statetris has gone international, we realize just how little we know about world geography.
There are new versions of Statetris for Africa, Europe, France, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, and for some reason, the state of South Carolina.
Game play is pretty much the same for each version. Just drop geographical locations into the appropriate place on the map. Depending on which version you're playing, the goal may be to put states, provinces, or countries in the proper location. Play often enough and you might just be able to figure out how to find Latvia on a map.
The Japanese government is working with 10 major Japenese auto makers to develop a standardized automobile operating system. While we're tempted to make jokes about blue screens of death and unexpected errors, the truth is many cars now include complex electronics and require a computer system to coordinate all those newfangled parts. And developing a uniform operating system is going to make life a lot easier on your poor neighborhood mechanic.
JasPar, or the Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture group will be responsible for developing the platform. JasPar is a joint venture that includes the cooperation of Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Toshiba, and other auto and electronics makers. Many of those companies are currently developing their own operating systems.
The goal is to have a prototype available in 2009, with a final version on the market in 5 to 10 years.
How do you get people to stop posting television clips and full episodes to the internet? You probably don't. But a government panel in Japan has an interesting take on that idea: don't try to stop internet pirates, just regulate them.
The Intellectual Property Rights Policy Work Group is expected to issue its recommendation this week. If adopted, anyone would be allowed to post television programs online without permission of the content owner. But anyone who uploads such video would be required by law to pay a royalty to the content owner.
Under Japanese law, television rights belong not just to a network or studio, but also to the actors, making it very difficult to get permission from every stakeholder to redistribute programming. The move isn't likely to be popular with content producers, since it limits their control over how their material is distributed, and takes away their ability to negotiate royalty fees.
But it makes a certain amount of sense. As the RIAA and MPAA in the U.S. are well aware, going after pirates is an expensive and time consuming process. Sure, it might be almost as difficult to get everyone who is uploading video to pay royalties as it is to sue them into oblivion. But such a law could be a start. It would allow YouTube, for example, to begin charging fees to users who upload copyrighted content, both reducing the amount of pirated material online and increasing revenues for content holders.
The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors is kind of a little upset at YouTube for the amount of content that is available on Google's service that their members own copyrights for. Just last December YouTube was ordered to delete 30,000 files that were in violation of Japanese rights holders. JASRAC sent out a letter recently to YouTube asking that they delete the files immediately when found during a five day audit of YouTube content. Needless to say, that didn't stop unauthorized content to pop up right after all of the deletions were made. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are scheduled to attend talks in Tokyo next week, with 's video content producers to discuss copyrighted material, and try to come up with a solution to the matter. Just last week Viacom sent out a letter ordering YouTube to take down over 100,000 copyrighted videos immediately. Google had apparently promised them that filtering tools would stop unauthorized content from getting through. Other companies like Warner Music are having a great time using the video giant's exposure in the marketplace.
Imagine you were unexpectedly thrust into a world where those same cute Mac-and-PC ads were on TV, but they were in a language you couldn't understand!* That world is, well, Japan, and those ads are right over here. They're just like the American ads we're used to, except with two funny Japanese dudes, and they're in Japanese. You can check out the ads in their full-resolution glory at Apple Japan, or you can just look below, where low-res but English-subtitled versions away.
Funny, but it's just not the same without our national treasure John Hodgman. You can find the other two ads after the jump.
The ever popular MySpace social network has banged out a special Japanese version of the networking service, and launched it today. MySpace is currently running national versions in Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, and in the UK. This new language integration is a team effort between News Corp. and Japanes bank Softbank. The main competition in Japan for MySpace is the 6 million member service called Mixi. With all of this money and traffic behind MySpace, why in the world can't they spice up their user interface? Nevermind, maybe that's what makes the site work so well.
The impact of Google's new ownership of YouTube has revealed itself this week in a big way. According to Ars Technica, the video sharing site removed 29,549 Japanese videos from its database at the request of JSRAC, the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, whose members identified the videos as containing unauthorized materials from Japanese movies, TV shows, and music videos. This is the first such large-scale removal of content from YouTube at the request of copyright holders, and is undoubtedly the shape of things to come. JSRAC says that they are considering petitioning YouTube to implement a better screening process for unauthorized uploads, but unless I'm mistaken Google has previously said they're already working on that. For a little perspective, according to a July report, over 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Still, I'm a little worried what this means for one of my favorite blogs, TV in Japan, but at the moment they don't seem any worse for wear.
Google has reportedly opened up access to Gmail for users in Japan, after a successful launch of open access for Australia and New Zealand users. Google is trying to raise its presence in the mobile phone capital of the world, where more people access the internet from mobile phones than from personal computers.
Mainichi Daily News is reporting that about 30 Japanese organizations in Japan, including the University of Tokyo and major electronics and telecom companies, will be jointly opening a research institute to develop a next-generation search engine. The institute, which will be subsidized by the Japanese government, plans to have the new search engine "put into practical use" within two years. Among the companies involved are Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NTT, and the Mainichi article seems to imply that the end product will be open source.
Like so many buried Flash games
out there, Nanaka Crash has been around for a bit. You play
a girl on a bike, and try to hit boys with your bike. The goal is to launch the boys as far as you can. If you're lucky,
when they bounce, they'll hit another girl, who will hit them, and you'll get a nice bonus bounce. This sounds weirder
by the minute... Anyway, it's a one-button game, which I really appreciate. And while I don't need to get my jollies
playing a girl hitting boys with her bike, it's still a lot of fun.
I think it's
only a matter of time before Google brings something more like Google Earth to web browsers, but in the meantime check
out 3D Maps, a Japanese proof-of-concept that
takes map images from Google Maps and uses SVG to transform them into a pseudo-3D tilted view. It only works with
Firefox 1.5 and is pretty slow, but is cool nonetheless. If you read Japanese there's some technical information here, but for the rest of us the machine-translated
version is pretty obtuse.
Microsoft has made a deal with SoftBank, the largest VoIP carrier in Japan, to offer "VoIP,
instant messaging, Internet access, e-mail, groupware, presence and desktop services to Japanese businesses," says Ars Technica's Matt Mondok. SoftBank will
provide the VoIP infrastructure while Microsoft will provide hosted versions of its server products like Exchange,
Office Live Communications Server, and SharePoint. Microsoft says if they are successful in Japan, they may bring
similar packages to North America, but Mondok isn't sure they'll succeed: "Plenty of businesses still like to pick
and choose their software rather than have it given to them in one big blob. Will Microsoft make them think
differently?"
There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn't particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.
Like so many buried Flash games
out there, 
