Twitter Plays in the Japanese Playground – Launches Groups

For some reason Twitter has chosen Japan as the country where the team experiments with the latest features of the microblogging tool. The reason is that in Japan Twitter is a joint venture between Twitter itself and Digital Garage – hence the startup can behave differently in the country with experiments that are not seen elsewhere on Twitter.

Japanese users were the first to see Twitter’s attempts in monetization when Twitter started to show them some ads. Now the same country is used to experiment with a long-awaited functionality of groups.

Groups functionality discovered by Loic Le Meur works by allowing a user to follow groups of people. The functionality actually works as a stand-alone website called Twicco where users can choose groups they want to follow. Groups are based on the same idea as #hashtag idea we already use to track companies and events of interest. So as of now the functionality seems to look more like a separate Twitter application than an integral part of Twitter but of course deeper integration is absolutely possible in the future.

I believe these experiments in Japan are partly used to collect and evaluate feedback from users in Japan to see how these newly introduced features will do in the rest of the world. Besides, it can be also used to see how new functionality will scale as testing on a smaller number of users will obviously be easier than rolling the features out to the entire Twitter community all at once.

But actually we still have not seen any ads on Twitter yet and this remained the Japan-only thing (probably initiated by Twitter’s partner in Japan as not everyone should be as unwilling to make money as Twitter itself). Will we see groups on Twitter in the near future the way they are implemented in Japan? Chances are this could remain the Japan-only thing as well but only time will tell here.

In other news Rick Turoczy over at ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter has also removed delete functionality from Twitter so think twice before hitting that ‘update’ button next time as once sent the tweet will stay there for good. And there will be no need in blog posts discussing some questionable tweets from this or that internet personality later removed.

As there is no official explanation from the Twitter team about disappearance of the delete functionality, there may be various reasons for delete missing. For example, it could be just a temporary measure to remove some functionality to make sure that Twitter can survive the Election Day without meeting the fail whale.

But anyway it’s good that the news about Twitter is not about Twitter not managing to cope with the Election Day load so thank you for the news, Twitter team.