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 Twitter CEO Evan Williams when visiting Tokyo 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 became the second most-used language on Twitter after English. 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 #engtweet and #eigodewa to messages to show that they were practicing their English and to find like-minded students looking for microlessons.