While gloomy year-end political and economic round-ups are suggesting that happiness was not abundant in Japan this year, there¡¯s no denying that 2010 turned out pretty good for a certain little blue bird in Japan. Twitter soared in Japan this year, attracting some 1o million users and spawning dozens of new words and ways to use the microblogging service. ¡°Japan is the fastest-growing country in the world,¡± said this summer for a Tweetup. And it¡¯s about more than being the country that holds the record for most tweets per second.

English, please

. Japanese Twitter users flocked to books and magazines that promised to show them how to learn colloquial English by following native speakers and practicing the language 140 characters at a time. People appended hashtags like and #to messages to show that they were practicing their English and to find like-minded students looking for microlessons.