Live Report From Japan: Twitter Goes Live With Japanese Localization

Editor's note: This report comes to us live from Japan!

Tokyo - Twitter announced the launch of their first localization language to be Japanese from a press conference held at the offices of their Japanese partner Digital Garage. Streamed live on Ustream, Biz Stone and other members of the Twitter team had questions translated and answered between Japanese and English to the mainly Japanese audience in attendance. Daniel at CNET broke the news.

"This is the first localization Twitter has done and we're really exited about it", said Biz. "We're all here having a bit of sake to celebrate the occasion".

The interface isn't simply a translation of the Twitter UI into Japanese. It's also going to be used as a test model for Twitter to see how audiences react to the idea of ads being placed on Twitter. The Twitter Japanese interface went live several hours earlier (accessed through ANYONE'S account by going to the Account tab under Settings and looking for the Language drop down menu), and was already displaying the first first banner ad set up by Twitter.

It will be interesting to watch how audiences react to having ads placed on the highly popular social networking site. Digital Garage has already invested about 1 million US into having their partnership with Twitter.

Robert Sanzalone is a new media specialist, blogger and writer based in Nagoya Japan.