Foursquare has just announced that they will be translating their service into 5 new languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese.
This announcement happened at the Mobile World Congress that is happening in Barcelona.
It is great to see that Foursquare is starting to focus their efforts on the major languages throughout the world and cater to them. I would have liked to see them open up in China, but I’m sure that is only a matter of time.
It appears as though Yahoo! may be the first real competitor to Twitter. Other companies such as Facebook have tried to draw people away from micro-blogging back to social networking. But there has been no real competition on the actual micro-blogging front.
A while back, Yahoo! stealthily rolled out Yahoo! Meme in the Portuguese language only. Nobody was all too sure why they did this because as business goes, you’re supposed to promote, promote, promote! Now their reasoning is clear.
It was a test. To see if it stood a chance without causing the company any embarrassment if it failed. They are now tackling Twitter on the global front by launching the micro-blogging platform in the second biggest language in the world; Spanish.
While people all over the world do use Twitter, studies have shown that services are received better by the public when they are tailored specifically to their needs – in this case their language.
While I can’t see Meme over running Twitter on the English servers I can see the new Yahoo! service picking up steam in South America, Mexico, West Africa and of course Spain.
