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."

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.

1. Forvo: Forvo is a fantastic crowdsourced language site where users submit, rate and share audio clips in order to practice proper language pronunciation. One great feature is that audio files are mapped according to the speaker's region. This means you won't make the mistake of speaking le français du Québec to Parisians.

2. Babel Fish: Human translation will always triumph over online tools. Nevertheless, unless you're a diplomat, it's unlikely that you've got a polyglot at your disposal. One of the most established online translation tools, Babel Fish allows users to translate large blocks of text and URLs. This is particularly useful to understand hotel websites, online menus and directions. Microsoft's Bing Translator offers similar capabilities with the added ability to automatically detect the initial language.

3. Google Translate: Google Translate and Babel Fish are very similar services. However, Google recently added Google Translate functionality to Gmail. Now you can instantly translate your emails by choosing a language from the drop down menu.

4. TweetTranslate: TweetTranslate is a great service for those interested in restaurant and entertainment recommendations. The service integrates with your Twitter profile and allows you to translate your tweets into more than 40 languages.

5.BabelWith.Me: RWW first covered this cool chat translator a few weeks ago. BabelWith.Me allows users to chat in more than 45 different languages. This is a great tool for negotiating room and guide rates.

Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

As with any non-human inter-linguistic interpretations, the messages suffer in translation. But thanks to this new feature, you'll be able to get the gist of the Cyrillic text in your spam folder with just the click of a text link.

A small step, perhaps, if the screenshots below are to serve as evidence:

All in all, not the Labs' most impressive offering to date; nevertheless, it'll save us all a cut-and-paste to a free online translator.

TED Talks are brain stretching, tear-jerking, 18 minute nuggets of emerging wisdom. The new translation project is sponsored by Nokia and uses the awesome volunteer-powered translation service DotSub.

If you speak languages other than English, the rest of the DotSub site is quite worth a visit as well.

So far 306 translations have been completed, hopefully more will be performed soon. Bringing these TED videos to more people around the world is a big win for humanity. It is truly remarkable how TED has gone from a closed gathering for the global elite to becoming far, far more publicly available. Andy Carvin has some more details over at NPR.

The BlastCasta widget works with or without FeedBurner and provides options to filter your feed by keyword, sort it differently or translate it into any of 23 different languages. There's tickers and widgets and an API. BlastCasta could be a good option for publishers targeting tech savvy or mainstream international audiences.

The widget's small button can be swapped out with your own, there are some options to change the appearance of the drop down widget of options and there's API level access for developers wishing to dive deep into the functionality.

There are some usability improvements that could be made to the service; the feed combining feature is a nice idea but could use a clearer path to real use cases, for example. Integration with Postrank could be very useful, too. There is a risk that BlastCasta is going to get your feed "all dressed up with nowhere to go." Feed lovers are very creative people, though, so readers may find useful ways to use this service. There's certainly miles of room left for innovation in the feed manipulation space. This could be a cool way to make subscribing to your feed a more flexible experience for readers.

To check out the new service, visit BlastCasta's feed action widget page.

But what about all of that interesting news and information that's written in languages you don't speak? Get ready to have access to even more information about your favorite topics, because now Google Reader leverages Google Translate technology to convert any feed to your preferred language.

I tested the service against Cybozu Labs - a feed that comes through RSS in Japanese - and was pleasantly surprised. While a few of the characters remained, the majority of the content came through. Not only that, but the content was translated in a way that was legible and coherent.

While at first blush, this may seem to be a minor feature, it actually holds the potential to change the way people read feeds - and the feeds they choose to read. It will be incredibly interesting to see what non-English blogs start growing in popularity now that they're no longer hindered by limited linguistics.

But how will people find these blogs? That's the other thing that makes the translation feature so interesting: it appears to work on shared items, as well. Now, you can start reading and sharing information in any language with all of your Google Reader contacts - regardless of the languages they speak.

And once we start breaking down those language barriers and sharing ideas with more people, that may be a real step toward a truly World Wide Web.

Last month, a post by Marissa Mayer on the Google Blog pointed out the necessity of machine translation for the future of search, saying that the idea of machine-assisted translation is "an incredibly empowering idea" that could "change the way users experience the web and communicate with each other."

That same concept of empowering communications has been incorporated into the new SDL Automated Translations tool, too. The difference with SDL's tool is that instead of just focusing on translations for the web, it also translates documents, emails, chats, company intranet sites, and even internal business applications. Thanks to the tool's open nature, it can be incorporated into anything from customer-facing content on the web to an internal wiki or blog.

The quality of translations can be adjusted to fit your needs, too. For example, you may want your homepage to offer perfect translations of your text, but would rather have on-the-fly, instant translations for use in IM and email. For those quick translations, the tool simply gives users an approximate understanding of sentences and phrases by using something the company calls 'gist' translations.

Why This Is Big

According to Gilbane Group analyst Leonor Ciarlone, technology advancements and pure computing power have made machine translation not only viable, but also potentially game-changing. A global economy, the volume and velocity of content required to run a global business, and customer expectations is steadily shifting enterprise postures from "not an option" to "help me understand where MT fits."

In their group's Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report, they discovered that participants in the study, content management practitioners in multinational organizations, identified machine translation as one of the top three most valuable technologies for the future. Also of note is global communications company Language Weaver's prediction of a potential $67.5 billion market for digital translation, fueled by machine translation. That predication takes into account how new technologies now provide translation at dramatically lowered costs than before. This opens up new, untapped markets, asserts Language Weaver CEO Mark Tapling.

Markets and making money are obviously the focus for the companies involved in these ventures, but we're excited to see machine translation going beyond Google Translate and opening up the business world, too.

Crowdsourcing translations is a natural fit for a social network. At the same time, though, it does come with some pitfalls, including a higher chance of inconsistencies and sub-par translations.

For a site like hi5, which has seen most of its growth outside of the U.S., being able to provide its users with a localized version is simply a smart business move. Facebook, after all, lost a lot of its potential market share to clones in some countries because it did not offer localized versions of its service.

Microsoft Office

Out of the two announcements, Microsoft's is probably the least exciting, but, on the other hand, there is a good chance that it will see a lot more actual use than JaJah's voice translation. The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has just released this update to MS Office 2003 and 2007 to the Office team for integration, but they already offer instructions on their blog for setting this up yourself without having to wait for the official update.

The integration with Windows Live Translator allows you to translate English texts into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as vice versa. We have tested the Windows Live Translator and the translations were generally about as accurate as you would expect from machine translations. There are various mistakes and words it doesn't recognize, but overall, the translation is relatively readable and gives you at least some impression of the original text.

JaJah Babel

JaJah Babel is clearly the sexier product of the two. You can call access numbers in the U.S., England, or Australia, and after a voice prompt, you simply speak the text you want to be translated into Mandarin. The service will then replay your message, you acknowledge the accuracy of the input, and after a short delay, you will hear the translation. Given our general lack of knowledge when it comes to Mandarin here, we can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but the service itself worked very well and seemed to understand at least our initial input accurately.

If you are in China, of course, the fact that you have to call an international number to get this to work is a bit of a limitation.

Other Translation Services

There seems to be quite an interest in working on consumer oriented translation services right now. Just yesterday, we wrote about Mloovi, which translates RSS feeds trough Google Translate, and earlier last month, we wrote about the collaborative dictionary and translation service Lingro.

Babel Fish

JaJah's product is especially interesting here because it takes speech as its input and it will get even more interesting once it works for other languages beyond Mandarin as well. JaJah is offering this service based on IBM's technology, and given IBM's expertise in doing voice-to-voice translation, it will probably only be a matter of time before we see support for more languages. Besides other projects, IBM already supports the U.S. Army with an English to Iraqi Arabic translation service.

There has always been a lot of hype around the possibilities of instant voice translations, but very few products were ever good enough to make it in the consumer/business market. JaJah represents a major step forward here, even if its voice prompts make the service a bit less frictionless than the science-fiction ideal if autmated, instant translation.

Users can choose from a number of preset animations for their characters, ranging from shaking hands with others, to applauding, crying, etc. By double clicking on certain items in the virtual world, users can also often activate some preset animations such as sitting down on a chair or jumping off a dive board.

Setting the plugin up and creating an avatar is a very simple process. Creating rooms, too, seems quite easy, as you can quickly import a number of templates to get started. Currently, all virtual items for Lively are for free, but chances are that Google will start charging for premium items in the future.

For now, the content in Lively is being created only by Google, though over time, they are planning to allow users to start creating their own content as well.

Rooms can be easily embedded into any webpage and worlds often launch with a basic skeleton of the room within just a few seconds.

Graphically, Lively runs very smooth on our test machine here and the visuals, while not comparable to a modern game, are not too bad either. Interestingly, there is no first-person view available, instead, the world is always seen from a camera perspective the user can control.

One area where Lively could definitely needs some improvement is in how users move their avatars around the rooms. To move an avatar, users basically have to drag them through the room, while most people we have met in Lively have commented that they expected to see a more game-like approach where users use the keyboard to move avatars through the rooms.

Second Life users might find the Lively rooms and the amount of customization they can do to them rather restricted - however, Google's idea seems to be less to create one large virtual world, but to give publishers an opportunity to create their own small virtual world for their readers and visitors.

It's interesting to see Google moving into this space. There have always been rumors that Google might be working on a similar product for Google Earth. As of now, the rooms in Lively are compartmentalized and there is no way to move or communicate from one room to another, but given that this is only a first release, this might (hopefully) change over time.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers.

What Bit.ly Does Today

At launch Bit.ly is a relatively sophisticated URL shortener. It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you've shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit. It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link. It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.

How about these features, though? Bit.ly saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon's S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good). Bit.ly also tracks clickthrough numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got and from where. There's a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app (Betaworks affiliated gaming site ImInLikeWithYou already has this live) and all the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.

Those are some pretty awesome features but that's only the beginning. A javascript submission bookmarklet and user accounts should be available soon. (Update: Bit.ly just added a simple bookmarklet that will make it easier to use casually.)

The Future of Bit.ly: Semantic and Geo Spatial Analysis

In the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we've written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.

As if that's not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects.

You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Asheville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.

Why use a URL shortener to catalog all those pages? Why not? Each shortcut signals a page that's of importance to a real human user and an army of link-senders sounds like a great way to build up that database. Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy.

Then we can all share access to that data. We're excited and we hope you'll put Bit.ly to use.

The service is very feature rich, but the easiest way to use it is with a javascript bookmarklet. One click of the bookmarklet makes every word on the page you're on clickable for an instant dictionary pop-up. You can add your own definitions right in the same pop-up. For many of the words there are audio pronunciations provided, too.

The company was the subject of a long interview yesterday on the CreativeCommons blog, where co-founder Paul Kastner discusses many of the advanced features such as the ability for website owners to bake Lingro right into their pages automatically. That might be a good fit for ReadWriteWeb, given the international readership we have.

You can also upload whole files from your desktop and have them translated on the fly.

The bookmarklet in action, article continued below.

Lingro also keeps track of web pages you translated and words you looked up on your personal home page. All of that is using cookies, no account creation is required to use the service or add definitions. That's great, the service is really easy to use.

The collaborative dictionary builder gives anyone an opportunity to enter definitions of unsolved words in a variety of languages. Know what the words rapporteur, harmonise or feedingstuffs mean? Lingro users could use your help!

Kastner explained how the dictionary builder works and the basic philosophy of the project in the following paragraph from the CC interview:

Once someone has chosen a language pair they're fluent in, the builder shows them a list of words missing from that particular dictionary, ordered by how common they are in the language (the word "the" would be near the top, while "onomatopoeia" is further down). They can also see sentences showing the words used in context to help recall the meanings. These are the same kinds of tools used by the big publishers to create their dictionaries - we're not just opening up the dictionaries themselves, we're opening the entire process of creating them.

If YouTube users want to see the high-end of the fun spectrum in video annotation, they should check out Nico Nico Douga.

Unfortunately, you can't use the site without registering and registering is hard if you don't know Japanese. Thanks to Google Translate we were able to register and this is what we saw.

How Nico Nico Douga Works

After a mandatory account registration, Nico Nico Douga users can watch any of countless videos on the site and participate in conversations literally on top of them. A simple chat bar lets you shoot a message out onto the video at the moment you press post. The text zips across the video player and is gone, but is surrounded by messages that other users have sent at the same point in time.

The chat on top of the video is asynchronous, but a sidebar also displays the most absolutely new messages no matter where they are in the video. The end result is a fast paced conversation, sometimes with people watching a video at the same time as you but always in such a manner that it feels that way.

Nico Nico Douga makes about $1 million each month from premium subscriptions costing 500 Yen (about $5 USD). Premium subscribers pay to have their messages stay on the video after others expire and to be able to post in more colors, sizes and fonts.

You can't embed Nico Nico Douga videos offsite, but here's a screencap of one below.

Simulated Real Time

We've written here lately about the growing importance of real time communication and access to information online. The chorus of people calling on FriendFeed to add XMPP functionality for immediate updates is getting louder, as well.

We would argue though, that for any vendor online there is a real opportunity in simulated real time. In the case of Nico Nico Douga, the conversations feel like they are real time because of the way the user experience is architected. In fact, in some ways they are better than real time because only so many people are watching the same video at any given time.

Compare this to the way that Viddler from the US lets people add comments to videos. That's not nearly as exciting because they are not an integral part of the user experience. They are not intrusive either, but Nico comments can be turned off with a click.

Kyte used to put chat over the top of videos (it appears they don't any more) but those conversations weren't tied to particular moments in a video.

The Future of YouTube Annotation?

Perhaps the point is that Nico Nico Douga plays with temporal elements in a particularly appealing way. It may not always be real-time, but perhaps that's not literally what we as users want in all cases.

Will YouTube Annotations allow for temporal play? At least on the part of the video publisher they seem to do so. The next logical step would be to allow viewers to join in the fun as well. Nico Nico Douga isn't standing still either though, most recently launching a feature that lets users create their own cartoon newscasts with sophisticated editing and annotation.

If the future of sites like Nico Nico Douga is of interest to you, check out what Mr. Ryou Shimizu, developer of the site, is doing now with his new company Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc. (Google translation into English).

Trackur Trends

Unlike a larger service like Google Trends, for example, which only displays trends that are massive enough to cause a spike in overall search volume, Trackur Trends can regularly search for any keywords or phrase you choose, no matter how small or how rare it is that they are mentioned. You can also add filters to your search to help narrow down your results even further.

However, this new addition does not affect the price for the Trackur service - in fact, the price has now been lowered. The new pricing model actually makes it more affordable for everyone, but becomes especially appealing to the SMB market. Before, at $88/month, we wondered if Trackur did enough to make the service worth it, but today, Trackur's Standard service is available for only $18/month, so the answer to that earlier question is now "YES." (Note: the Enterprise version of the service changed to $188-197/month.)

If you're interested in using Trackur for your trend tracking needs, ReadWriteWeb has 5 free, 6-month Standard subscriptions to give away - just comment below with your information.