Myspace just launched a Spanish version of its popular social networking service. At Pelago, we have seen a strong push in the last year to localize web sites and applications for our clients. We have learned a lot about character encoding …especially in regards to handling email.
In the next week or so Intervals will support foreign currencies and date/time formats. This is our first step toward true localization with language support within the application coming at a later date. There is no denying the growth of the Internet abroad. According to internetworldstats.com, North America makes up just 21% of world wide Internet users. Their growth figures are pretty fascinating because they peg Internet usage growth at 116% in North America from 2000-2007, but that is the smallest amount of growth compared with the other world regions. The world average for the same time period was 209%.
The long and short of it is that the Internet continues to grow everywhere with the most aggressive growth outside of North America.