Twitter Stretches Its Wings: International Versions Take Flight
Twitter has announced it will soon grow from its current offering of English and Japanese only to include versions in French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
However, as their translation team now comprises just five staffers, Twitter is asking users to suggest translations for the website. "We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster, and we'll have enough material to respond."
Stone also noted that French, Italian, German, and Spanish, collectively called FIGS, are the starting point for the company's planned expansion into many other languages. But will the startup be able to dominate internationally, given the substantial ecosystem of Twitter clones?
We've long been interested in Yahoo! Meme, which built its user base by launching in Portuguese only, then expanding to Spanish and, more recently, English. Some of these sites are more obviously direct rip-offs of Twitter, such as the Spanish Birddi. In fact, the Twitter fan wiki lists 28 foreign-language Twitter clones and links to this exhaustive list of more than 200 microblogging sites around the world.
Some of these sites have stronger, more established communities than others. Some of the URLs have been sold, and we're sure that some will be shut down for obvious trademark infringement or other legal reasons as Twitter expands its reach globally. Still, a few will remain in each market as viable competitors (and possible acquisitions).
Another thought we've had is that this will bring Twitter into the same arena as MySpace, Facebook and other larger properties in terms of having a large enough base of users to justify its valuation and ensure its continued success. Sure, Twitter is the tech scene's darling, and MySpace is an ironic bit of ancient history to hardcore geeks. But MySpace still controls a large share of many international markets and, perhaps for that reason alone, still gets enough eyeballs to remain competitive.
According to a Compete.com report earlier this year, Twitter saw around 6 million unique visitors in January of this year, making it the third largest social website on the Internet. MySpace had about ten times as many visitors. Facebook, which made translated versions of its site a priority some time ago, saw 68 million unique visitors.
And if you've ever doubted whether Facebook and Twitter are competitors, take a look at this Inside Facebook report on that network's international growth, which has surged to the point that Facebook's international users make up a full 70% of the site's users. Will those accustomed to using Facebook status updates as their microblogging platform of choice see the point of adopting Twitter?
Is an international scope, starting with FIGS translations, going to take Twitter over the top and make it a major-league player in social networking worldwide? And how will it deal with robust microblogging competition in international markets? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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there had been controversies against twitter right? i hope it was already resolved.
Hi...
This is an interesting article.I would like to know more in Spainish language.If anybody have any idea then any informative link then please share it I am wondering this from the long time...
Great to see Twitter is becoming more aggressive in expanding globally. Should be clarified that this feature will help twitter specifically localize their UI (eg.-menu items, field names, site copy). The real benefit in going global occurs when all of your content (eg. - user generated data, articles, etc) can be translated automatically to attract global visitors.
I decided to do this automatically with my website fairly recently. I was able to not only translate my domestic content automatically for visitors, but my content was automatically indexed and page ranked in search engines greatly boosting my original global traffic (e.g.- page views) by several times.
There are different tools that accomplish this, some better than others (I have personally found success with www.nativetung.com). Nonetheless, nice to see more attention being placed on this important topic.
As a professional trasnlator, I think this tendency to 'have the users help out' with the translations is a disgrace. The fact that a very popular site like Twitter, that's beginning to obtain revenue from big corporations (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_revenue_to_come_from_large_us_corporations.php) can't spend a couple hundred bucks in a professional translation (it wouldn't be much more than that) sends out a message that translation is a worthless service, making the conditions even worse for those of us trying to make a living with our translation work.
I deliberately abstained from commenting to see how other readers may react first, and frankly I´m disappointed the article has attracted such little volume of comment on such an important topic. I´m not sure if that reflects the monolingual readership of RWW or if FIGS don´t actually give a fig.
Twitter will not enjoy the same adoption rates in all western economies as it could have done had it localised earlier. Pro translators will rightly fulminate against crowdsourced efforts to translate, while wannabe translators will vy for points or Twitter kudos as a badge of honour despite practically signing away their DNA in those translator terms.
Twitter will need more than a linguistic translation to really succeed outside of anglosaxon circles. Localised trending topics and a kickstart from some leading celebs, plus some flat rate data tariffs from the telcos and carriers, maybe SMS push messaging, like how things took off in UK in 2008 are what is needed to really get the snowball moving.
In the same way Google stole the march on other portals when they launched eons ago with a clean interface, Twitter have at least sought to under-complicate the UI. So bring on geolocation tweets for sure, and continue to satisfy power users by fostering the great 3rd party API dependant apps, but never forget to present that underlying and outward simplicity that allowed people to feel confident about starting to use the service in the first place.