An unfinished thought about “how languages hit the web”.

Power, Dispersed, New Orleans, Louisiana

As much as I’m fascinated by “where the web meets world”, “how languages hit the web” is almost as interesting.

Why? Because the interesting and truly valuable stuff happens where edges hit cores. Where the core of the online hits the core of the offline. Where the core of the known hits the dark core of the unknown. Where the mini-cores at the edges of innovation hit each other. Where the cores of languages collide or slip past each other, unknown to each other, ships passing in the night.

We’re ultra-focused on the upsides and limits of location-based services, but geo-locational data isn’t the only context that matters.

Consider language, the difficulty in explaining some concepts in certain languages, the difficulty in translating cultural context and simple cultural stubbornness; while “unfriend” was 2009’s word of the year, Wes points out that it’s not so simple in France:

In France the unfriending process is known as “la défaire d’un ami dans le Livre des Visages“.

Perhaps it sounds sweeter off the tongue, but it doesn’t roll in 140.

But that’s a simple example: the real interesting stuff comes when you consider how languages collide on the web. Without a functioning babel fish, we’re a little lost outside of our own tongues. And no, Google Translate isn’t there yet, sorry.

A question: how many people do you follow on Twitter that mostly tweet in foreign languages? Sander might be the only one I follow who tweets mostly in a language I don’t understand (excluding the in-jokes from some of the NOLA krewe, of course), but that’s only because he shares enough interesting links to articles in English to make up for the loss of all the conversation, all the personality, all of him.

Consider the extended social media reach by people that speak multiple languages, consider the great French and Chinese bloggers lost to the English-speaking web world (and vice-versa), consider the general lack of language sensitivity by most American web product designers, and the simplifying assumption most of us take when we “think globally, act locally” that the web speaks English.

In short, I miss out on a lot of the web simply because I only speak English. Right? What’s the biggest thing I miss? I’m not even sure I know. Care to illuminate?

Or perhaps, a more practical question, what’s the business opportunity here?