Why be US-Centric?
I tried to register for outside.in but guess what? They don’t support Canada nor Canadian towns yet! Fucking faggots. But it got me to thinking, why is it that there are so many US-Centric companies out there? I am talking about the companies that severely limit membership or hinder registration due to the lack of internationalization in their programmes.
Offender: outside.in - This only allows you to add stories if you live in the US. Notice how when you go to add a story, it requires an address, zip code or city and state. Notice how the fact that the address is in US format, zip code is not postal code or it requests city and state instead of city and province. This is terrible, given the attraction shown to them by FeedBurner. They should learn to be way more international, given the nature of their site. Outside.in should work to extend it’s reach to Canada, and to cities like Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and others.
Offender: Google Checkout - Google Checkout is only allowing US addresses to sell merchandise via it’s Google Checkout service. This sucks immensely because there are many international stores - a great number of which use Google AdWords as well - that could benefit from using Google Checkout. But unfortunately, there is a serious lack of Internationalization at Google - which is very saddening. Of course, they allow people to order outside of the US and Canada.
Tags: internationalization, postal_code, Rants, Software Development, support_canada
February 26th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Sorry to be intrusive on your blog comments. I don’t know what but the email I’m trying to send you is bounced back.
I have updated your address in the expat blog directory, thanks!
Note that I am working on a new version of the website, with a lot of new functionalities.
Have a good day,
Julien
nb: If you want to support the website, just add a small logo/text link on your blog
February 26th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
“We’re U.S.-based for the time being, but if you register for the site we’ll send you updates with each new country we add, along with other news about our progress.”
that is a quote from outside.in, right on the front page. so you’re whining about a site that is US based NOT being internationalized? i am sure there are Canadian based sites out there that provide the same service. that is pretty petty.
And Google check out: “We’re working toward making Google Checkout more widely available in the near future. At this time, however, we cannot provide any details regarding when Google Checkout will be available in specific countries.”
Google Checkout is still fairly new, and if you actually KNEW the international laws regarding it, you would understand. But it seems to me you did little to no research before ranting about it.
Internationalizing sites takes a lot of work, and I mean A LOT. It’s not as simple as adding a few extra forms. You have to add more security to prevent the scammers, you have to add multi language support, which means hiring translators to translate the default text (online translators just don’t cut it), and then you need more people to handle international support. It took Google search a few years before their search engine was international.
If you want this blog to succeed, you need to start taking the extra step and researching before you post accusations, because within 5 minutes I was able to find out why these sites weren’t more internationalized, and outside.in took me 3 seconds because it is clearly stated on the front page of their site.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:59 am
As a Canadian, I feel your pain, but a few things to note:
1. The US has far greater ‘open’ info than any other country. Be this geographic data (ie for geocoding), mapping data, weather - a lot of it is freely provided by the government not available in any other country (including Canada).
2. The most money is in the US. The internet is globalizing the economy, but the US still has the most money floating around.
3. These people are Americans. The US and Canada have some interesting underlying geographic differences (and even more confusing ones when you try to go to a country like UK). So is it easier to build something that just works in your neighbourhood, or one that works world-wide?
4. The VCs are American (mostly). If you want to show Product X to Person X that is an American, international support is a low priority. They don’t really care about non-American (not at first), so its a waste of time.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:14 am
I am an american as well but I know the valuation of reaching out to the international community. Why? I am an expatriate living in Canada - trying my hardest to get citizenship. That’s why 15art, Inc. will not use a VC. We will use OUR income only to ensure that we are not influenced by corporate control.