As I wrote last week, there were news that Twitter Japan is going to start “premium” services, but just after the news came out, twitter JP said like this on their blog.

Recent Press Coverage about Twitter Service in Japan

Our partner in Japan, Digital Garage, Inc., just made a statement about the recent press coverage about Twitter service in Japan as below.

In response to media reports stating that Twitter Japan will be launching a paid-premium accounts service on Twitter, we would like to officially state that this is not correct. To be clear, Twitter service in Japan is a free service and neither Twitter Inc. nor Digital Garage, Inc. (JASDAQ code: 4819, headquartered in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, CEO: Kaoru Hayashi, henceforth DG) have discussed or have any plans for paid-premium accounts. Also to clarify, Twitter Inc. and DG enjoy a commercial partnership but do not have a joint-venture arrangement in Japan.

The recent media reports are likely a result of a misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile, about potential business opportunities that it could explore as a third party. DG Mobile’s presentation was unrelated and separate from the Twitter and Digital Garage partnership.

DG apologizes for this misunderstanding and for the delay in correcting the information. We hope this clarifies our commitment to helping Twitter Inc. continue to grow and enhance its free service for Japanese users.

As  I was little curious about the news because it said GD Mobile which is the company run Twitter JP, but I thought twitter JP was run by Digital Garage…

GD Mobile is one of the Digital garage’s related company, I didn’t know that, so made me little confused – maybe the news source was not clear enough.

However, I checked the some news sources and some of them shows kinda detailed plan of the monetize plan, well… there were a plan for sure…

• Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January – TechCrunch
• 6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan’s Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan) - TechCrunch

Anyway, twitter won’t run that kind of services, they said, but using their API, anybody can develop anything like that, you can think of many business model using twitter. Personally, I don’t like the smell of money on the open web application, but then how the developers make money? there must be some good way to monetize, maybe…

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