I’m another recent Plaxo hire…I joined two weeks ago to lead Plaxo’s Globalization effort. It’s time for us to expand our international presence and show our international members that we really care about them.
It may seem weird to say we want to increase international presence when we already have members in over 83 countries and about 30% of our members come from outside of the US. The 12 countries with the largest Plaxo membership are:
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Canada
- Brazil
- South Africa
- Netherlands
- Germany
- France
- Mexico
- New Zealand
- Italy
- India
Did you notice the same thing I did when I first saw it? Seven of these are either English speaking countries or countries where people speak English well and feel comfortable using it. We have nothing against our English speaking members; in fact, we love them. But one of our goals in 2006 is to enhance the user experience of our non-English speaking members and show the world what a smart address book can do.
Judging from visits to our site and search trends, folks around the world are taking notice. According to Google Analytics and Google Trends.
There is definitely a correspondence to our overall international membership numbers, and also a noticeable absence of Asian countries.
Back to Globalization; we are working to consider international users’ needs from design to development to localization to support. Yes, we are going to localize Plaxo! We'll start with a few languages, with many more to follow. Can’t talk about dates yet, after all I’ve just started!
I’ve made a career of Globalization and am really passionate about it. If you are an international Plaxo member and have comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Please post here or email me directly.
-- Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization
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Good Idea? what about to start in spanish?
Victor, our globalization model is not to have multiple sites (and therefore multiple databases) in different languages. Rather, our model is to have a single internationalized binary/data store to handle information in multiple languages. We have implemented Unicode for that purpose. So right now if people in China have friends there and business contacts in the US they can find all contacts and see their info in the appropriate language. We have a few things to iron out this year but we already provide what you are asking for :)
As for Numito's suggestion for a Spanish version: Spanish is one of the languages we are considering! Thanks for your comments,
Regina
Hi,
I am from Tokyo and would like to have Japanese one! I can help you out for translation and beta-testing.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Hisao,
We certainly welcome our members' contribution to Plaxo's Globalization success. I know how important it is to get top quality localization for Japanese. So I thank you for offering to help. Could you send me an email so we can take this offline and add your name to my list of Japanese globalization contributors? My email address is my first name followed by our domain.
If anyone else reading this posting wants to be a Plaxo Globalization Contributor please contact me directly. Regina
Regina,
I've also been wanting to manage my Japanese contacts with Plaxo. Let me know if I can beta test anything.
Taro
it's a good news.
more than the translation of plaxo, the US calendar week is a big trouble for europeen people, because begin the week by Sunday is a non sense for us (Monday). So we do a lot of mistake when we use plaxo because the day a not in the same order.
Will it be easy for, say, somebody on the Chinese Plaxo site to find a colleague's address if the latter is on the English site?