Piling onto the pre-holiday frenzy of Nintendo 3DS downloads is Swapnote, a messaging service that allows players to send notes to other 3DS owners via StreetPass and SpotPass. Finally, some way to communicate with other 3DS owners besides that silly Mii Plaza pre-scripted meeting!

As of this posting, only Japanese 3DS owners can download Swapnote, but Nintendo's European branch has confirmed that the program will be available in their region tomorrow (the program is called "Letterbox" in Europe). Nintendo of America has, again, remained silent on the subject, but if they take the same sneak-attack approach as with the GBA Ambassador games, we'll be seeing Swapnote on our side of the pond pretty soon.

It'll be interesting to find out whether players must exit an application or game in order to access Swapnote. As almost everything on the 3DS has a tendency to run as only one at a time, I'm betting this program will function similarly. That would kind of suck, since players eyeballs-deep in Ocarina of Time won't get that message from a friend wanting to start a Mario Kart 7 play room. Ah well, we take what we can get, right?