The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".
The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.
By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.
That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.
I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.
The system allows the core of the site to be language independent. When Netlog wants to launch in a new language, it just hires freelancers, usually foreign students at Ghent University, to translate the words, not the underlying computer code.
Compare that with what MySpace had to do when it wanted to launch in non-Western languages like Japanese and Russian. The site had to rewrite the code of its entire Web site, a Herculean task that took MySpace's 40 developers six months. "It was pretty controversial internally," said Travis Katz, MySpace's managing director for international. "But we thought this was the right thing to do; international growth is the key to our future."
The article then goes on to explain how for less than €1,000, Netlog was able to launch a new site in Turkey. This is truly amazing stuff to consider. The MySpace.com and Netlog.com comparison really helps shows that the impact of not thinking in more global terms when developing a site will eventually limit just how quickly a site can move into new markets.
However, I will argue that U.S. based Websites have more than just a language barrier causing similar issues for moving into newer markets. Social-networking sites tend to be 24 hour sites driven by content contribution from their users. The problem is that most site are not social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace.
How many other sites in the United States don't the luxury of user contribution and must rely on publishing their own content to the sites? Too many to count! The majority of these sites could publish material any time of the day, yet the U.S. sites as a whole will only give users the bulk of their new content during the North American working day. That's a real shame, if you ask me.
If you really wish to reach a global audience then I really would recommend catering your content not just during the day and evening hours of North America, but also the rest of the world's day. Perhaps it was spending 15 years of my early adulthood working rotating shifts and night-time hours that has opened me up to the realization. Or it might simply be that I'm a natural night owl and have been able me to observe what the bigger sites don't see. Either way, it's forced me to recognize the other 16 hours most 9-5 American workers don't see. There is an untapped market both globally and domestically...a market that is available when most Americans are in bed.
I've made it a habit to make sure I'm providing some type of content through the entire twenty-four hours. By doing so, usually someone in Europe is able to read in the early morning a new post from the United States while most Americans are sleeping. Other parts of the world may read the material sometime after work or before they go to bed. Never once though, do I assume that because my website is in the United States there is not interest elsewhere in the world to visit my site.
I must be doing something right, because stat after stat continues to shows my site as a destination sought not just regionally, but also globally. I didn't have to learn a new language to lure people from other countries to CMSReport.com. What is my secret weapon? I just had to acknowledge that there are people that exist outside the borders of the United States I should get to know. For some people that is sadly a very hard concept for them to understand.