
Geni Clone Growing A Lot Faster Than Geni - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/geni-clone-growing-faster-than-geni/
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pg
Maybe startups should take the trouble to offer localized versions within a
couple months of launching. The Samwers are taking advantage of the fact that
startups are ignoring something that's probably trivially easy.

~~~
ivankirigin
I haven't dealt with it before, but I'm told i18n is a pain -- not close to
trivial.

A good system would be automated though -- making adding the Russian language
equivalent site at startup.ru scalable in software.

~~~
downer
Isn't this Unicode support? Something that has been somewhat lacking in Ruby
but present in Python.

Technically it shouldn't be a problem, it's just a matter of getting
translators :)

~~~
herdrick
It's a hassle. Every string displayed in your site (aside from the user
created stuff) now becomes a bundle of strings, one for each language. Also,
how are you going to organize the different versions of your site? Will you
just use the same URL for each page and just have some global user language
preference that makes each page render accordingly? Now the smallest change in
the text of your site will now require consulting with your translators, which
in practice means that you no longer do small changes. You accumulate lots of
changes and send them off to your translators in one chunk, then update them
when _all_ the translations get back to you. Slowing down the iteration cycle
can be fatal to a startup.

To avoid this, you can instead maintain a different site for each language and
bring your non-English (well, non-whatever you're comfortable with) sites up
to date with the English as you do translations. Now you have forked your
code.

Hassle.

~~~
downer
URLs aren't a big deal. Most people bookmark anyway, they don't type them in.
I mean are we going to complain about the character set for domain names next?

I surf sites that are natively in other languages and seeing words in URLs
that aren't in English doesn't bother me. It reminds me the world is a big
place :)

> Every string displayed in your site (aside from the user created stuff) now
> becomes a bundle of strings, one for each language.

That's good practice anyway, from the standpoint of being able to make changes
without touching the code.

> Hassle.

 _Web development_ is a hassle in the first place. But being able to handle
other languages isn't any more complex than separating presentation from code.

~~~
herdrick
I'm not sure what you're talking about with URLs. I was talking about the
implications of implementing this in different ways and saying that there's no
easy way.

~~~
downer
Re: _"Also, how are you going to organize the different versions of your site?
Will you just use the same URL for each page"_

~~~
herdrick
It's not the unicode. That's easy. It's "how are you going to separate the
English, French, Hindi, etc. versions, from each other?" Will you have
different URLs or the same URLs with a global preference, or something else?

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iamelgringo
Part of it depends on the language and framework that you're using. Not to
start a flame war, just pointing out a simple fact: RoR doesn't handled i10n
and l8n nearly as well as Python/Django does, for instance. If your language
doesn't support Unicode strings well, you're kinda screwed when it comes to
setting up your site in Russian.

I agree, though. We in American startups tend to be rather myopic when it
comes to different languages and cultures.

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bdr
I always thought Geni's interface kind of sucked. There could be a lot of
reasons this one is taking off while Geni is stalled.

