Twitter is something a lot of modern Japanese internet folks use. The adoption of Twitter in Japan is amazing. Anyway, for this reason there are some neat little Twitter applications out there that somehow just do not exist in English (at least I don’t know about any). Twipla is one of those.

Twipla is a meeting invite/organization tool. It is very bare-bones, so you shouldn’t be arranging your wedding invitations with it. A meeting organizer can create a Twipla page, detailing the event. Any twitter user who wants to join the event can visit the page, log in and authenticate their account with Twipla, and sign up for the event.

It turns out a lot of Japanese offkais are nowadays arranged using Twipla. There are also Twipla that organizes crowd funding, like these guys who wants to rent a train for IM@S 10th that expresses between Ikebukuro and Seibu Dome.  Fans also use Twipla to advertise their event flower-giving. You can browse the main page on Twipla for some ideas.

For this post, I’ve added some screen shots from an old Twipla page from our Anime North offkai last year as a guide.

Click on that blue “Twitter” link right in that rectangular box to log in.

Twipla pages are public, as in anyone with a link can access it. On a basic level, I’m not sure if it does anything besides let the individuals leave a note under the appropriate column: “Going”, “Interested,” and “Not going.” In this example I pressed the middle button, “Interested.” It’ll give me a box to put in some text in the form of a tweet. Press the blue button and it will register the text. If you check the checkbox when you press the blue button, it will also tweet what you wrote, plus a link to the Twipla page. Uncheck it if you want just to leave the note on the Twipla page.

By default it says “interested” in Japanese as a mention for the event organizer, but you can change that.

And that’s it. If you want to create a Twipla, it’s also really simple even if you don’t read Japanese, but I think we’ll leave that one for you to figure out.

For Anime North 2015, most likely we will be putting up a couple Twipla pages to arrange the Producer meetings apart from the convention. Stay tuned for those…