Twitter, mixi form Japan tie-up as Facebook gains

TOKYO (AP) - Twitter Inc and Japan's biggest homegrown social networking site mixi Inc joined forces on Wednesday to strengthen their ground against a rapidly expanding Facebook.

For Twitter, the partnership with a local social network could point to a new strategy as the San Francisco-based microblogging service seeks to accelerate global growth. Japan is the company's second-biggest market after the United States and has served as a key international testing ground of sorts.

Japanese was Twitter's first foreign language platform, and it opened its first overseas office in Tokyo earlier this year. In April, the company hired James Kondo in Japan as its first international country manager.

Mr Kondo said he didn't know if Twitter would forge similar partnerships in other countries. But the company is keen to see what happens with the experiment, which launched with a limited Christmas-themed application, he said.