
Only 50% Of Twitter Messages Are In English - vijaydev
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/twitter-languages/
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tibbon
As one of the lead researchers at the Web Ecology Project- I can confirm that
this was also true in 2009 (our finding of a small sample of 1M tweets found
it was ~61% at the time). It doesn't shock me at all that it could be down to
as low as 50% at this point.

Jon Beilin of our group wrote and open sourced (MIT/X11-license) a Python
language detection module that we used on our Twitter database.
[http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/code-release-
google...](http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/code-release-google-
language-tool/)

We did _not_ find Japanese to be as high up there as this group did. I can't
remember, but I think when we ran ours the Twitter.jp was still running as a
separate domain perhaps?

~~~
patio11
I'm not the most plugged in person to the Japanese Internet, but over the last
6 months or so I've started to see Twitter rise pretty fast here. First it was
on the sidebars of the portals, then the Japanese word for "tweet" started to
show up in the headlines for the scandal rags that I scan on the train ride to
the office, then folks at my office started asking me whether I had a Twitter
account yet. So you might be seeing some growth in addition to possible
sampling issues.

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mgk
This should be a non-brainer – ie. catering to the non-English users of the
Web.

I wish I could say we were smart enough to have taken that in to account when
we started, but, like most, we were oblivious to the fact, and only ended up
awakening to the opportunity by virtue of our community leading the way, with
their use and volunteer localizations of our offering.

At this point, about 50% of our users are non-English (our offering is
available in 30 languages - again, all localized by volunteers).

We are monetizing in 40 countries, using PayPal to sell low cost subscription
based web services and virtual goods. In order of sales - US, UK, Canada,
Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, France, and Brazil.

So, my best advice to all those running a start-up - think global. You will be
able to monetize once you get there.

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lsc
personally, I find that google translate is mostly good enough to tell what
people are saying about me (and sometimes for me to fix the problem.)

Still, many people say that Orkuit was killed (from the USian point of view)
by the influx of Brazilians. It will be interesting if/how this plays out on
twitter. Will you just have people engaging with other people in their own
language? will you have positive for everyone mixing? (this has been my
experience so far.) or will one language become dominant and will speakers of
other languages largely abandon the site, as in the case of orkut (which I
can't even remember how to spell at this point.)

~~~
axod
I think the larger implication is not that you can't understand tweets, but
that monetization may be pretty hard if majority of tweets aren't in English.

~~~
lsc
why is that? are there not good non-english ad networks? or is it just that
most of the rich consumers speak English?

~~~
tibbon
I've worked in advertising, and there are fewer great non-English ad networks
out there (can deal with large volumes and also will yield high CPMs). Also
the non-English portion is fragmented into dozens of different languages.

It isn't impossible to do, but certainly harder to build an international ad
sales team.

~~~
rphlx
Perhaps foreign ad networks are finding native partners, instead of going
after English speakers. There are >800M mandarin speakers, surely, that's
enough to attract a lot of advertisers, just maybe not US ones.

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Gmo
The title makes me thing that this is considered a _bad_ thing ...

For me, it would be more a good sign, twitter is getting traction
internationally, how bad can that be for them?

The comment about monetization is something I hadn't thought of in the first
place, but what makes you think there are no good ad network in the Spanish,
Japanese or French speaking world (just to name a few) ?

Granted, I'm French, living in the Netherlands, and I tweet in both English
(for my public profile) and French (mostly on my private profile), so this is
a topic that reaches me.

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kwamenum86
Mainstream American websites generally follow a 66 percent international and
33 percent domestic ratio. The 50 percent figure meshes well with that ratio
given the number of English speaking foreigners.

------
wenbert
I am from the Philippines. All of my friends (in Twitter) speak in their
dialects unless they want/intend something to be read by other people who only
understand English.

