I just had a look at Simon Willison’s talk at Google about the implications of OpenID. Basically he covered a short FAQ list, answering some of the most common questions about OpenID. During the talk it was interesting to see how often he had to refer to the notion that OpenID doesn’t try to solve every problem, but that there is enough opportunity to build on OpenID to try and solve any other issues. This got me thinking about the problem of localization and how we could solve/aid this with OpenID

As a Dutch person I am very interested in localization as I would like to use a lot of service with my Dutch friends and family (mother). I would like to motivate many of my less tech-savvy Dutch friends to use things like Twitter, Jaiku and Flickr instead of local copycat versions. In many non-English speaking countries these services get copied, for example Zezz.nl which is a Twitter/Jaiku clone build by Alper for the Dutch market.

The problem with this copycat-approach is that you get localized silos of separated networks, with some people like me having to sign up to a localized version and an English version in order to be able to share with everyone I know. A good example is that I currently had to sign up for Facebook AND Hyves for social networking, as Hyves is far more popular in The Netherlands than Facebook. To make things worse: would I ever move to Brazil then I would also have to sign up for Google’s Orkut which is far more popular there!

So why not localize? First of all localization is a tedious job and secondly it is easily done wrong. To understand what goes wrong quite often, you should realize that in the English language we use the same terms over and over again on different sites for the same concepts. We use “save” for saving a file, “delete” for deleting it, and so we use other standard terms for other concepts. Calling the delete action “purge” and the save action “store” would still be understandable but defy expectations and possibly create confusion. This is exactly what happens in most localizations of systems, as there is no standardization of the terms used across sites.

So in comes OpenID, which when I log in to multiple sites already identifies me to every site, and is able to provide personal info using SRE. So why not extend this concept or create a new system that can enable an OpenID consumer to request what my localization should be, an possibly request translations directly from the OpenID provider. Obviously this should at first only work for basic terms like “Save”, “Delete”, “Open”, as full sentences might be a bit far fetched (for now).

I actually don’t think this is a problem though, as most people in foreign languages have some experience with the English language, but are just scared by a 100% English system. If for example Flickr would only localize their menu, I would expect that the user experience for many new Dutch Flickr users would become way easier. Funny enough Zooomr already has a localized version that is semi-translated.

Clearly it is not OpenID’s task to solve the problem of localization, but as Simon Willison stated: there is a lot of potential to build upon the OpenID idea. Combining this with the idea that OpenID providers will have to differentiate themselves by the services they offer leads me to conclude that they are all thinking of new techniques to implement.

An accessible OpenID interface to the localized verbs and nouns of the user would come in very handy here, especially for small sites that don’t want to do any localization. Making these libraries of terms user-generated would even make it a less tedious job and actually just a technical job. Does anyone know if this idea has been coined before?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2007 at 22:02 and is filed under Localization, OpenID, usability, webservice.