Tag Archives: Facebook

The best global websites of 2012

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I’m happy to announce the publication of the 2012 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 105 websites across 17 industries; the websites comprise 70% of the Interbrand Best Global Brands of 2011. This year, we also reviewed mobile websites and mobile apps, to better understand how companies were balancing global and mobile strategies.

Out of the websites reviewed, here are the top 25 overall:

Last year, Facebook emerged (barely) as number one. This year, Google reclaims the top spot. Although Google continues to struggle to harmonize its global navigation across its many applications, the company also continues to invest in globalization. Google now supports more than 140 languages on its search engine and its new Google+ app supports an impressive 40 languages. Facebook’s mobile app, by comparison, supports just 13 languages. Though Facebook continues to improve its global navigation, its language growth stalled in 2011.

As a group, the top 10 websites support an average of more than 50 languages. They also demonstrate a high degree of global design consistency across most, if not all, localized websites. This degree of consistency allows them to focus their energies on content and mobile localization. Two new companies on this list – Hotels.com and Booking.com – exhibit an impressive commitment to mobile devices. Any company that is developing a global mobile strategy should study these two companies.

Why didn’t Apple make the top 10?
I’m anticipating I will get asked this as I was asked the same thing last year. After all, how can a company with nearly $100 billion in the bank not be in the top 10? It seems that Apple has been rather tightfisted with its translation spending; the company supports far fewer languages on its website than on its mobile operating system iOS. Does it make sense for an iPad and iPhone to support Arabic and Hebrew and for Apple’s website not to support these languages?

Language parity between mobile and PC is a key component of the 2012 Report Card and Apple did not fare well in this regard.

It’s worth noting that of the websites reviewed, roughly half now support Arabic and/or Hebrew.

In the Report Card, languages account for 25% of a web site’s score. We also evaluate a web site’s depth and breadth of local content, support for local-language social networks, the effectiveness of the global gateway, and global consistency across PC and mobile platforms. Beginning in 2010, we began tracking how companies promote local social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter around the world. In 2010, only a handful of companies supported a Twitter or Facebook page outside of English. Today, more than half of all companies reviewed support a social network outside of English.

Cisco Systems is worth studying for its Social@Cisco pages. This social aggregation page was first launched in 2010. It is now available in more than 30 markets, with local feeds incorporated.

Hard for me to believe, but this is the eighth edition of the Report Card. It’s the largest report ever, with 40 website profiles and a special section on “taking mobile global.” I’ll have lots more to say in the weeks ahead.

To learn more, check out the 2012 Web Globalization Report Card.

Facebook is the best global web site of 2011

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Analysis for The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card is now complete, and Facebook has emerged in first place, narrowly edging out Google.

Last year, Google and Facebook tied for first place, so I want to be clear that both sites are global leaders in their own right. And I also will confess that comparing a social networking platform with a company that supports more than 40 web and client products is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

The goal of the Web Globalization Report Card is not only to highlight web globalization leaders (and their best practices) but also to shed light on the future of the Internet itself. From a multilingual perspective, Facebook has been quite innovative over the past year. And, more important, these innovations have broad implications for how millions of companies integrate social networks across their local web sites.

Facebook’s Social Plugins initiative has been enormously successful, with more than a quarter million web sites now supporting plugins such as the “Like” button. But what many have not noticed is that these plugins are also multilingual.

What this means is that if I insert a “Like” button on my home page (which I’ve done here), the language of this button changes based on the user’s language preference (assuming the user is logged in to Facebook).

Here is an example from the Byte Level Research site:

I used a German example to highlight a text expansion limitation. These plugins are not without rough edges, but it’s hard to argue with the direction in which they are taking the Internet. A multilingual social graph is being developed by the many millions of people clicking “Like” buttons. Privacy issues aside, it’s going to be very interesting to see where Facebook takes this platform as it matures.

Second, as I noted a month ago, Facebook recently began allowing users to modify their profiles to support multiple languages. This too is an important development. Perhaps this move was designed to increase advertising revenues. Or perhaps Facebook has a more noble goal of better serving multilingual users. Time will tell.

Facebook is far from perfect. I’ve been critical of its abuse of the globe icon (though Google has similarly struggled with global navigation). And Facebook will need to up its localization game if it’s going to win in a market like Russia, where VKontakte dominates.

That said, it’s hard to argue that Facebook, with 550 million web users (most of whom live outside the US), hasn’t done a lot of things right; it practically reinvented translation crowdsourcing, went from 2 to 74 languages in record time, and is clearly a company that all companies must follow closely in the years ahead.

The Report Card is now available.

Select Language(s): Facebook takes language settings to the next level

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Facebook is updating its user profile page (profiled in-depth here) and one of the changes is to ask users to self-select one or more languages.

Facebook already looks at the user’s web browser for an indication of what language he/she prefers, but this is far from a perfect solution. Having the user self-select languages allows Facebook to do some fairly nifty things when it comes to aligning users (suggested friends, interests, etc.) — and, of course, improving ad targeting. It remains to be seen what Facebook does with these multilingual user profiles.

My friends must wonder how I’ve sudden become so multilingual as I’ve been playing with this feature. Here’s my current list of languages (Spanglish included):

And here’s how these languages are presented on my profile:

Notice the globe icon!

Thankfully, Facebook is correctly using a globe icon to indicate languages. Now perhaps Facebook will kill the globe icon for notifications (something I’ve been critical of before). Facebook now uses the globe icon for three different features on its portal — something’s gotta give.

That said, I like that Facebook is making languages a high-level profile feature.

Multilingual web users are an important segment of the Internet. In my experiences, I have found that these users tend to be very key proselytizers of social networking services — and I’m sure Facebook is well aware of this as well.

Properly supporting multilingual users is an important step forward and one that I believe other companies will attempt to duplicate in the years ahead.

Notes from Localization World Seattle

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I was hoping to write an in-depth review of each session I attended at LocWorld but I’ve got a crazy few days ahead and am traveling to the Unicode Conference next week.

So here are some thoughts from my experience there:

  • LocWorld had a record turnout — more than 500 people — which is very impressive given the state of travel budgets at many companies. Some attribute the turnout to Microsoft, but I believe they only sent 40 or so folks. I tend to view the localization industry as a leading indicator of the economy, much like the advertising industry, so I’m reasonably optimistic about 2011. I talked with a half dozen people from companies that have ambitious web globalization plans for the next calendar year.
  • I really enjoyed the one-day International Search Summit that preceded LocWorld. Rebecca Berkick from Xerox gave an excellent presentation on her company’s global expansion and improvements. Xerox supports 160 web sites across 20 languages — with Hebrew coming soon (their first right-to-left language). More important Xerox migrated from using .com as the base domain for all local sites to ccTLDs. So instead of Xerox.com/index/dede.html, users in Germany see Xerox.de. This may seem obvious but it was a big undertaking — and Xerox is already seeing the payoff after only a short time. The single most important thing a company can do to improve not only its local search engine results but its overall “localness” is to use ccTLDs.
  • More than one presenter commented on how Facebook has shifted their search engine marketing strategies from link building to Like building.
  • I sat in on the Facebook session in which internationalization director Ghassan Haddad shared insights on his company’s translation crowdsourcing effort. Facebook leveraged its half-million volunteer translators to go from 2 languages to 75 in two years and he provided data to show a direct correlation between the launch of a language and a massive growth spurt in users who speak that language. His presentation was probably the most compelling argument I’ve seen in a long while for why language matters.
  • The “crowd” translated Facebook’s 200,000 UI words quite rapidly for a number of languages — just two days for French. But Facebook won’t wait until every last string has been translated before it pushes the site live — speed is more important than perfection. But despite the massive number of volunteers that have helped Facebook, Ghassan stressed that companies can have a successful crowdsourcing strategy with significantly fewer translators. And I’d agree  – 10% of your volunteers will do 90% of the work. The question I would ask before proceeding is not how to build a crowdsourcing platform but is your content translation worthy? Also keep in mind that volunteer translators on Facebook are “known” — that is, there is no such thing as anonymous translation; this greatly reduces the risk of nefarious behavior.
  • The globalization of social networking was a hot topic. Many of the translation agencies (I mean, language service providers) wanted to know how to make use of Twitter, Facebook, etc. to promote their businesses. But I wondered aloud in my session if agencies are prepared for a future in which more and more content is not translated but is created locally. Translation agencies can and will play a role in this future environment, provided they realize there are many opportunities outside of translation.
  • Machine translation was also a hot topic, though it’s not something most companies feel they can act on easily. I see the large tech and tech-savvy companies embracing MT — and challenging their vendors to do the same. But mid-sized companies are just not there yet. Smaller companies are going to be the most interesting to watch, since they’re more open to any free MT or crowdsourced solution that works for their customers.

Next week, I’ll try to post some notes from the Unicode Conference — where I’ll be speaking on The Art of the Global Gateway.