Twitter launches in Japan

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Twitter, the blockbuster U.S. microblog on which users can post no more than 140 characters, launched Wednesday in the land of haiku, Japan, expecting to strike gold from the country’s cell phone addiction. The website lets users send terse sentences — or “twitters” — onto constantly moving bulletin boards telling people what they are doing or thinking at that instant.

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The new Japanese-language site will be a test case by posting advertisements, a first for Twitter, which was launched in 2006 by San Francisco-based Internet start-up Obvious.

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Despite the site’s popularity in the United States, one-quarter of access to Twitter in February originated from Japan, said Hiroki Eda, a senior executive at Digital Garage, a multimedia group that handles Twitter in Japan. Twitter does not publicly disclose its number of users.

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