Warren Seen

… isn’t that what they say in the real estate industry? Picking up on last night’s (slightly derailed) train of thought, I’m going to talk a bit more about locality in the web 2.0 context.

I mentioned in a previous comment that I don’t think US-based web 2.0 startups are sensitive to the local/global dichotomy. And why should they be? There’s more than enough of a market for most NewCo’s in the States, without all of the fuss that comes along with expanding across borders. So a US slant on things is almost a default.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Ok, so maybe it’s not the case that there’s anything wrong, but it’s certainly a sub-optimal situation for the rest of the English speaking world. If you don’t think that’s the case, I encourage you to name me a popular 2.0 startup from Ireland, or Singapore, or even Canada, off the top of your head that has its own slant.

Now I’m not saying these things don’t exist, but clearly the mindshare is not the same as a Flickr, or del.icio.us, or Reddit, etc. Why not? Clearly, talented people exist in these countries too.

And now we come to my point – for each of these examples, the technology is perfectly capable and does not need replicating by a startup in another country.

BUT…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to filter these, based on a user’s location? Location is something we all share, something that communities are built on in the real world, and also in the electronic world.

More crucially, locality is the one piece of metadata which can be used to describe anyone on the face of the planet (and indeed those who are not on the face of the planet).

Sure, you could go and tag everything with your location, but i don’t really think that’s appropriate, what you really need to be doing is tagging yourself, not the photo/link/story you are submitting. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Egypt, it would make no sense for me to tag photos of the great pyramids with “Launceston/Tasmania/Australia” would it?

So who does locality right? One example is Google News. Compare the subtleties between http://news.google.com and http://news.google.com.au and http://news.google.co.in, all of this done transparently to the end user. This is all well and good, but I have to say that I don’t think even Google has got this right yet. No matter how many times they try to force it into my eyeballs, as an Aussie, I really don’t care who’s playing in the SuperBowl, any more than I care who’s playing in the final of the Kazakhstani Goat Polo championships. Needs. More. Relevance.

So I guess the take home message is this: if you want a global audience, you have to let them interact locally too. Don’t just glob everyone together into “cyberspace” – that’s just soooo web 1.0 and what’s more, it takes on a distinctly American flavour, when some of us are hungering for some home cookin’ of our own.
If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t be surprised to see competitors with better support for multiple locations overtaking you in the near future. There are twice as many Europeans as there are Americans, and support for Euro languages is mostly a snap.

I also have this nagging feeling that multibyte character support may be helpful in the near future too… but that’s internationalisation, not localisation, and the subject of another post entirely…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 1:21 am and is filed under locality, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.