Twitter now available in South Korea

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Twitter Inc. has just added Korean, the seventh language for the San Francisco micro blogging service. Twitter is already huge in Japan, and South Korea could also be an important market. About 70 percent of Twitter users are outside of the United States.

Twitter announced the news in this blog post and sent us this English translation:

Twitter use is growing in all corners of the world. In the last year, one of the fastest growing countries for Twitter is South Korea. There are now ten times as many Twitter users there than there were just a year ago.

As of today, Twitter will be even easier for Koreans to use. Among other updates, Twitter.com and Twitter's mobile web site are now translated into Korean.

By making Twitter available in Korean, people will be able to more easily connect with people and accounts that are most meaningful to them. There are plenty of great Korean users to follow already, including:

-- @oisoo posts witty Tweets, some of which were published in a best-selling essay last year.

-- @moviejhp shares insight on his life as a movie actor. You can find comedian and TV show host @keumkangkyung and TV anchor @kimjuha on Twitter.

-- Super Junior band members: @donghae861015, @heedictator, @siwon407, @shinsfriends, @special1004, @allrisesilver, and @ryeong9 are on Twitter.

If you want more ideas for Korean accounts to follow in politics, business, technology, sports and other areas, check out these lists, organized by topic. (Make sure your language is set to Korean to see Korean accounts.)

Twitter has also updated the popular Korean versions of Twitter for Android and Twitter for iPhone. And, we want to thank our partner Daum for displaying top Korean Tweets on their homepage and making it easy to find friends from your Hanmail address book; and LG U+ for working with us to make Twitter available via SMS in Korean for their subscribers (shortcode is #1234).

If you already have a Twitter account, you can change your language to Korean by going to the Settings page, which you can find under the dropdown menu in the top right corner of Twitter.com. To keep up with the latest information about Twitter in Korea, you can follow @twitter_kr for updates from Twitter HQ, @dowoomi for Twitter support, and @toptweets_ko for top Tweets from Korean users. To share your feedback on Twitter in Korean, you can include #twitterkr in your tweets.

With this launch, Twitter is now available in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Korean. With 70 percent of Twitter accounts belonging to users outside the U.S., it's important for us to make Twitter available in as many languages as possible, and we hope to support even more by the end of this year.

Posted By: Benny Evangelista (Email, Twitter) | January 18 2011 at 06:00 PM

Listed Under: Social networking, Twitter