Global by Design

LAN Airlines is trying to expand its US presence. I’ve flown the airline once — back when it was known as LAN Chile. I received an email from them last week in which they promoted their new Twitter page: What I found interesting is they use of “USA” in the Twitter address. LAN had been using [...]

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Over the past six months, Twitter went from mostly serving people based inside the US to mostly serving people based outside of the US. Today, 60% of Twitter’s 105 million registered users are based outside of the United States. And half of all tweets are in a language other than English. This is a remarkable trend, [...]

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Was there any doubt that Twitter would not try to crowdsource its translations? After Facebook proved that it could use volunteers to go from 1 to 100 languages in two years, it was just a matter of time before Twitter adopted the same model. Twitter is starting out with the FIGS (French, Italian, German, and [...]

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I’m not exactly a power-Tweeter, so I can’t say I have the need for a tool that stretches Twitter’s 140-character limit. Still, I get a kick out of Maxitweet. To understand what it does, here’s an example. I entered the following text: 149 characters. Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little [...]

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My previous post on Twitter got me thinking about what other companies had registered language-specific domains for their Twitter accounts. Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands. Like who? Apple, for one. Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple: It appear that Microsoft reserved its [...]

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