The other day, Swedish blogger Emanuel Karlsten (Google Translate it!) quoted an unknown source about the difference between Facebook and Twitter:
"Facebook is for friends that are now strangers, Twitter is for strangers that should be friends"
Really like that quote, and the little more nastier ones that has being going around as well.
"Facebook is for the friends you had in high school, Twitter is for the friends you wish you had."
... or alternatively;
"Facebook is for the friends you wish you didn't know, Twitter is for the friends you wish you had."
Anyhow, we can conclude that for many, Twitter is a great way to meet new and interesting people from near and afar. People that you really share common interests with, be it on a professional or personal level. Personally, I've had the opportunity to meet for instance my new employer, colleagues in the same business as I and friends who I run with every week - I'm all over the map and couldn't be happier about it.
But there is one thing that is above and beyond my understanding with Twitter, and that is how they are handling languages. Or let me correct myself, how they are not handling them. There are thousands and thousands of people that I would very much like to know around the world, especially from a professional standpoint. The problem is, that the people who I'm referring to is speaking another language and I cannot understand their tweets. So, naturally there's no point in following them. In the same way as some non Swedish-speaking people have stopped following me the past months, since I've gone from tweeting mostly in English to mostly in Swedish. I don't blame them, it's quite natural.
Now, to what I don't understand: why has Twitter not handled this problem before? With just a couple of hours of work, the people behind the social media tool could add the possibility to;
- ... select what language your default and single tweet is in.
- ... select what languages you can read.
- ... let you choose whether to automatically translate and show the rest of the tweets, or to entirely hide them from your feed.
The translation process could of course pose a problem, considering the mess Twitter already is in with heavy traffic. But there is really no reason not to add that the other features right away.
What would the effects be? Well, to name a few;
- Increased sharing over the borders - more knowledge for the people!
- Stronger international networks. If you already have a really strong local or national network offline today, there is fewer reasons to use Twitter. Opening the borders could lead to more established business, science and other special interest leaders joining.
- People with long tail interest would suddenly see a point in joining, some don't today as there is to few in their sphere of interests on Twitter in for example Sweden. ("There's only IT and PR people there anyway.") This would translate to more common use!
There's probably several more reasons to, as the Nike crew would put it, just do it... so Twitter people, what are you waiting for?
