IS Parade

IS Parade is a parade generator that can be used with Twitter accounts. Users can enter their Twitter account details and generate a parade of their followers’ characters. The generator was unveiled on April 30, 2010, as part of one of their new smart phone promotion activities by au, and has generated 13.5 million parades as of November 15. It has been tweeted to celebrities in Japan and overseas, including Biz STONE, the co-founder and creative director of Twitter, as the parade spreads around the globe.

Interpersonal relations on Twitter represented as a virtual festival
Created as a promotion site for the IS series of au phones, IS Parade attracted tremendous interest with its features that take advantage of the characteristics of Twitter, a website created in July 2006 that established a new style of relaxed communication through chains of “tweets.” The number of Twitter users increased explosively, and the first voices across the chasm began to reach the early majority from the end of 2009 through the beginning of 2010. The release of *IS Parade was finely timed to coincide with that period. At firstglance, IS Parade is a rather silly service, which allows users to simply generate parades of their followers or other Twitter users who have used a cer tain keyword in their tweets by entering their own username or the keyword in question. However, the propulsion of interpersonal relations into such a festive virtual space is precisely the type of social activity that we experience across various networks. The monumental impact that this site has made on other promotion initiatives that use Twitter is a proof of the historic significance of IS Parade.
*Chasm: Marketing term that indicates the divide between early adopters of a product and the early majority.