Twitter’s Korea service starting soon

It seems the Twit Korean is not very far away. The Hankyung newspaper’s IT journalist and a prolific Twitterer @kwang82 tweeted today that, “Twitter is about to launch a Korean service” and noticed that Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, is planning to visit Seoul for a press conference tomorrow. His invitation card reads ‘Twitter Loves Korea’.

Twitter is only available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese, prompting some Korean twitterers touse Twitkr or Twit bird. As Blogger Ajenneja pointed out some of Twitter’s major functions, such as the hashtag, do not work properly in the Korean language and the Twit search gives terrible results when searched in Korean words longer than three syllables.

The exact purpose of the press conference is unknown but considering the recent changes in Twitter’s help desk, it’s more or less certain that Twitter in Korean is about to be realized. @Barunsori6 tweeted under the title [good news for fellow Twitterers not fluent in English] that Tweeter’s help center is now available in Korean, which was roundly welcomed with such comments as ‘Yay, finally! I can complain in Korean.’

As more Koreans join social networking services KCC (Korea Communications Commission) warned net users today to guard their personal information, saying current private information exposure is at ‘dangerous levels’. Korea’s Twitter users have reached over 2 million, according to Korea’s Financial News, and the number of Facebook users have skyrocketed to 3.5 million. HanKyoReh newspaper revealed, quoting a survey of 200 Korean Twitter users that:

some 88 percent of the users revealed their real name, 86 percent gave information about their personal connections, 84 percent gave information about their appearance, and 83 percent revealed their current location[…] Additionally, 64 percent of users exposed information about hobbies, 63 percent about their schedule, 52 percent about their family relationship and members of their family, 50 percent about their workplace and group affiliations, 49 percent about purchasing records and consumption tendencies, 38 percent about academic attainment, 31 percent about their birth date and work address, and 29 percent about medical details such as past medical conditions.

Despite KCC’s request to keep your private information to yourself,  my timeline was busy with people’s tweets babbling how they think and where they are at right now.

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