Webware

ComScore on Wednesday released its ranking of the top search properties in Japan during the month of September 2008. And although the same two leaders in the U.S. -- Google and Yahoo -- top the list, it's Google that's trailing in Japan.

According to ComScore's qSearch data, 5.9 billion searches were conducted in Japan in September and the average person searched 96 times during the month. Yahoo led the way in search query volume with 3 billion searches and 51 percent market share, but Google wasn't far behind with 2.3 billion searches and 39 percent market share. Microsoft, which makes the third-most popular search engine in the U.S., only mustered 90 million queries during the month to take the fourth spot in the country behind Japan-based Rakuten.

"The search market in Japan is dominated by Yahoo and Google, which combine for more than 90 percent of the market," Maru Sato, managing director of ComScore Japan said in a statement.

Yahoo's control over the Japanese market comes in stark contrast to the U.S. search market, which is dominated by Google. According to ComScore's September data, Google controlled 62.9 percent of the search market, compared to Yahoo's 20.2 percent.

Glam Media has continued its international expansion, appointing former DoubleClick and Excite executive Yukihiro Yamamura as CEO of its Glam Japan division. Glam Japan hasn't actually launched yet, but is slated to go live later this year.

Yamamura had been head of DoubleClick Japan previously, and before that he had been CEO of Excite Japan since 1999.

"The appointment of Yukihiro Yamamura is a strategic addition to the Glam team as we continue to leverage the fragmentation of the Web globally," Glam CEO Samir Arora said in a release Monday. "With an accomplished background in online advertising and operations from DoubleClick and Excite Japan, Yamamura brings local expertise that will be invaluable as Glam Media expands its position as the leading vertical content network."

Flush with venture cash, Glam has been growing like crazy--hiring former Google sales executive Michael Adair as vice president of corporate development and finance, acquiring overseas properties to help fuel international growth, and launching new divisions.

Does Google know judo? Maybe. Google Street View has pulled a sutemi--a judo throw in which you launch yourself at the ground, risking disadvantage, to topple your opponent--on the entire Floating Kingdom. Even though Japan knew that the controversial Google Street View was coming to Japan, the tech savvy country was caught off-guard by Google's willingness to involve itself in yet another privacy imbroglio.

A photo shoot in Japan, captured by Google Street View.

(Credit: Google)

The pattern is familiar. Cars mounted with the Google Street View cameras scoot through a neighborhood, taking 360-degree shots of all they surveil. When the feature finally goes live, amused Netizens find images of people in compromising positions, while others decry the end of innocence--uh, privacy.

In Japan earlier this week, the real-world Google Street View effect saw images of two high-school lovebirds playing dentist, a photo shoot in a park, a person collapsed or asleep in a street, the wife of a CEO of a major Internet services company, and the expected shots of couples entering love hotels, which is basically a motel with hourly rates and vibrating beds. The irony of this is that the Japanese are often obsessive about their privacy and ''saving face'' can often be taken literally, where people will cross their arms in a big X in front of their bodies or faces when you threaten an unwanted photograph. When I was living there, I even had a shop owner come out and demand that I not take a photo of the exterior of his trendy shoe store. That's quite a different attitude from what we experience in the U.S., and ironic given the popularity of photography there.

An uncontroversial bird caught in flight by Google Street View in Japan.

(Credit: Google)

On message boards, the debate has mirrored that of other countries, from the expected, ''new technology is ruining our way of life,'' to a bear-hugged embrace of finally being able to see what the place you're supposed to be going to looks like. That's no small accomplishment in Tokyo's notorious neighborhoods, where warrens of streets zig, zag, and loop back upon themselves seemingly without logic.

Still, Japanese IT professional Osamu Higuchi was so horrified by Street View that he wrote an open letter to Google explaining how it has acted out of disregard for local standards and could encourage more crime. He called the effects of Street View ''evil.'' Heavy stuff.

Despite being a country with one of the lowest per-capita crime rates anywhere in the world, Japan's media is obsessed with reporting on any change that could lead to an increase. As such, Higuchi's letter isn't surprising. His concerns that laundry left out to dry and car parking spaces revealed in Japan's densely packed and often-empty-during-office-hours residential neighborhoods could lead to higher theft rates are not without some merit, at least in theory.

While it's not as crazy a theory as the Hadron Collider destroying the planet, I've yet to see any reports of increased crime anywhere being linked to Google Street View. Also, as JapanProbe and others have noted, Google has been quick to remove offending images and has been using face-blurring algorithms to try to add a modicum of privacy protection.

Street View, the driver's-eye view on Google Maps, made its debut in the United States, but it's now available in Australia and Japan, too.

Sydney, Australia now can be explored with Google Maps' Street View, shown with blue lines where available. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

The Street View service has raised privacy hackles in some quarters, but it's helped me navigate in areas I've never visited: What does the house I'm visiting look like? Or the street corner where I'm supposed to get off the bus? Or where exactly is that big-box retailer?

Google also is extending Street View to Europe, and in the process is gathering data that will let it create 3D models as well.

To alleviate privacy concerns, Google blurs faces in Street View.

Update 3:30 p.m. PDT: The Google Lat-Long blog said the Japan imagery covers Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and other cities in Japan, while Australia gets Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and others.

Extra bonus: There's also a Street View Easter egg that Google apparently tucked into the service--a photo of what appears to be a gaggle of Street-View-loving Googlers.

If Twitter Japan is successful with its roll-out of ads, it could become a model for the English-language version.

(Credit: Joi Ito)

As Twitter Japan gets going upon its launch Tuesday night (California time), one of the things that observers are going to be most closely watching is whether or not Japanese users accept the ads that are on the new site.

That's mainly because one of the biggest questions--or maybe concerns is the proper term--about the main, English-language version of Twitter is that, because it's ad-free and free to use, it has no obvious business model.

In an interview, venture capitalist and Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito--who helped create Digital Garage, which was largely responsible for localizing Twitter for its Japanese version--explained that it was thought that implementing ads from day one was the way to go there.

Digital Garage invested in Twitter as part of the localization arrangement.

"Ads are important," Ito told me. "It's always harder to add ads later. So we're launching with them in Japan."

Until I saw what the Twitter Japan site looked like, I wasn't at all sure how ads would work. But after seeing an image of the site, which Ito posted on his own blog, I think it's actually a pretty light implementation, and one which users of the English-language site would be hard-pressed to get up in arms over.

Now, I'm not a proponent of ads. I love free online services. But as an editor of mine said this evening, it is sometimes hard to fathom how angry users get when someone tries to put ads on free sites. "How dare they try to make money," seems to go the thinking.

Well, there's more to it, of course. Obviously, many implementations of ad-supported sites are horrible. But meanwhile, Twitter is rolling along, building a user base of people who are becoming more and more dependent on it, and there doesn't seem to be a dime coming in, at least not from the public site.

And certainly, there have been rumblings here or there about ads coming. But an Internet truism seems to be that you simply can't add ads to a site that hasn't had them. There is no better way to chase away your users than to do that.

But I think the Twitter Japan ad experience is going to be very closely examined, because if people in Japan aren't put off by the ads, it's going to be hard to make the argument that people here would be, even though we're used to the ad-free model.

The question may eventually come down to whether people would rather have Twitter with ads or no Twitter at all.

I don't mean to sound alarmist, or to be an apologist for the ad model. But again, after seeing the Japanese site, I just can't see how having ads on Twitter's pages here would be all that much of an imposition. Sure, it would ruin the simple, clean, innocent feel of the site, but that can't last forever, can it? Google's home page still doesn't have ads, but its search results pages sure do.

Another interesting thing, meanwhile, about the Twitter Japan ad model is that it launched with spots from Toyota, which link to an opt-in Toyota Twitter feed.

I'm not sure exactly what would come through that feed, but it's not clear to me how receptive the audience will be to corporate marketing coming through feeds. On the other hand, there are already some examples of that here, at least in the form of political marketing, like that of Barack Obama's Twitter account.

Whether that model would fly for corporate accounts is very uncertain to me. I know that I personally would have no interest in a Dell feed, or a Microsoft feed. I'm trying to think of a company whose feed I would willingly subscribe to--and read--and I'm coming up blank.

Ultimately, then, the lesson here may be: Get ready to deal with ads on Twitter, in one form or another. I could well have this totally backwards, but I'm guessing not. Where Twitter loses me, however, is if they push ads into associated services like Twhirl.

But if ads ever do come, and they're just on Twitter.com pages, well, I'm going to cut the company a little slack.

Twitter Japan launched Tuesday night California time. The site included ads from the get-go in a bid to get users to accept ads right away. The English language version doesn't have ads.

(Credit: Joi Ito)

Twitter Japan launched Tuesday evening California time, and unlike the English-language version of the popular microblogging site, it will feature ads from the get-go.

In a conversation Tuesday evening, Joi Ito of Digital Garage, the Japanese company Twitter tasked with some of the Japanese localization, told me that Twitter decided to launch in Japan with ads from day one.

Digital Garage invested in Twitter as part of the localization arrangement.

"Ads are important," Ito said. "It's always harder to add ads later. So we're launching with them in Japan."

According to Ito, Twitter Japan will have Toyota as one of its first advertisers. The car giant will have its own Twitter feed, and its ads will direct people to that feed. Users will be able to opt in for the feed.

"The idea is to get companies to have Twitter feeds," Ito said.

In addition to being a co-founder of Digital Garage, Ito is also a venture capitalist, the current CEO of Creative Commons, and, among other things, the founder of a very influential World of Warcraft guild.

To launch with ads is an interesting choice for Twitter Japan, especially given that the English version doesn't have them. However, there have been rumbles in recent days--denied by Twitter, that ads are coming.

And no wonder: There is no clear path for Twitter to make even a dime off its consumer English-language site. And, as Ito suggested, it is much harder to convince a user base to accept ads after the fact than from the beginning.

I was curious how kanji might affect Twitter's traditional 140 character limit on the Japanese site, but Ito pointed out that Japanese is already a dominant language on the existing site.

He pointed me to a site that aggregates the most frequent location of Twitter posters, and, at least in the 24 hours between April 21 and April 22, there were more Tweets made from Tokyo than from any other city in the world.

In fact, according to the site, there were more than twice as many Tweets from Tokyo (28,874) as from New York (14,367) or San Francisco (14,348). Of course, if you add up all the English-language cities, Japanese is far behind English, but Ito's point is well taken.

In the end, then, it will be interesting to see if Japanese Twitter users turn to Twitter Japan and accept the ads, or whether they'll stay using the main Twitter site.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Information Architects Japan)

It's always fun to see people try to map out the internet. The comparison to a spider's Web is apt, as things get a little complicated. While not nearly as humorous as efforts from Web comic XKCD (here and here), design agency Information Architects Japan has taken to the more calculated cartography medium of urban subway systems.

Last year the company created two versions of the map. Both were based on the Tokyo area train map (which is enormous) and organized 200 popular Web sites by neighborhood. This year, the firm ramps the number sites up to 300, and organizes the train lines with less overlap, making it easier to read. Users can submit suggestions for site inclusions or removal using an anonymous feedback form.

To give it a look you can either go here and see it in its full PDF glory, or check out the online version which is a little easier to read. The Web version also lets you click each site name to go to it. There will also be an A0-sized (one meter squared) poster available for a cool $50, once the map is finalized.

[via BoingBoing]