I’ve started using Twitter, the famous “micro-blogging” tool that lets you make short observations and send them out in real-time. I like it because the conversations you can have with people on the other side of the world are fascinating, and it’s a useful way of trading information back and forth on the fly. For example, if I’m writing about English words the Japanese use that are based on British terms and want to check some facts before I push out an update, I’ve got several hundred really cool people who are happy to shoot me a quick reply when I post a question. Twitter is also starting to catch on with Japanese users, too, who probably appreciate its simpler learning curve compared with sites like Facebook or Mixi.jp (there isn’t one). Although Japanese users have the same 140 character limit as the rest of us, they’ve actually got a big advantage: because of the way kanji compresses a lot of meaning into a single (two-byte) character, you can fit a lot more information into the same space, allowing them to express themselves more freely. As a test, I googled a Japanese translation of the famous “To be or not to be” scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to see how much of it would fit into one tweet. Nearly half of it made it in, all the way up to “…and by a sleep to say we’d end…” If you’d like to follow me on Twitter and read my random thoughts, by all means please do!
Twitter is slowly building popularity with Japanese fans.
