Multi-language Social Networks

From the logo I see today on FriendFeed, I guess they just introduced localized versions of their UI. For the Italian and the Turkish markets.

I don’t care much, usually I don’t like localized versions, but the move totally makes sense: FF is quite popular in Italy, and from what I hear social networks are very popular in Turkey.

But while most social networking tool support multi-language UIs, what they are missing is support for multi-language users.

It’s what happens to everybody who speaks English and a other languages, and has friends speaking exclusively only one of those languages.

I ended up trying to write most of my stuff in English, because my friends on-line are a pretty mixed group. But I do realize that sometime I publish stuff in Italian, and while most people can live with it, I know that somebody is slightly annoyed by this.

I don’t think that figuring out a language of an item is very difficult these days, but I’m still waiting to see a social network that does this well, allowing users to receive only items in languages they can understand, if they want to.

As far as I am concerned: I’m happy to see some French, or German or any other language, crossing my feeds from time to time.