My Flickr account translated into Chinese (I think?)
If you haven’t already heard, this week Flickr released seven localized versions of their user interface. It is now available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Portuguese. This is exciting news.
While Flickr may have some more issues to work out, I have a feeling this will play a huge role in Flickr more effectively attracting a much bigger global audience.
Yahoo! VP (and man who the Flickr team reports to) Bradley Horowitz, referring to the recent announcement, recently wrote in his blog, “Flickr is stupid, and late… but redeems itself.” I think we all can learn a lesson from this.
Isn’t it time that all of the popular Web 2.0 applications start moving in the direction of translating and localizing their interfaces? We should be building our applications from the beginning with the understanding that we at some point will be localizing the UI.
It is a WORLD WIDE Web. It won’t take a long for a Web app to get a world-wide audience.
When will Digg or Facebook follow Flickr’s lead? Back in November 2006, there was a post on the Digg blog about how they were internationalizing their databases by moving to UTF8. There has been no sign of Digg taking any big next steps.
4 responses so far ↓
Angela’s Thoughts on Facebook Being Unfriendly to a Global Audience « Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog // June 16, 2007 at 12:23 pm
[...] Resume/CV ← Is Flickr Just the Start of More Translated and Localized Web 2.0 Apps? [...]
smange // June 16, 2007 at 4:28 pm
You’re right. This is very much down the line of what I was saying in my post. If you want to expand your market you have to make it usable for more people. Simple!
Ange.
YouTube Launches 9 Localizeds Versions of their Site « Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog // June 19, 2007 at 8:07 am
[...] the only one realizing how much more effectively they can serve their global audience with localized versions of the site for specific areas of the world. YouTube has just launched country specific sites for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the [...]
Could you stop international clones of your Web app by globalizing it from the start? « Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog // August 11, 2007 at 12:18 am
[...] How much of this could be avoided if the Web application were to design itself for a global audience from the beginning? I wonder how many more customers Flickr is picking up because they globalized the reach of their site. [...]
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