‘Global’ Web Services Failing the World Market

This list rounds-up several web applications that claim to serve a ‘world-wide’ audience but who’ve fallen short on delivering to people outside of the U.S. and Europe, in most cases not for the lack of trying. It’s purely observational and not meant to be too critical. These are all services I use everyday, both before and after I left the States. It just so happens that now that I’m using them from Uganda I’m noticing some weaknesses.

1) Twitter

When Twitter announced that it was shutting down most of it’s international services back in August, there was a collective gasp from people outside of America, Canda and the U.K. who were spared from the cut back. It wasn’t that Twitter didn’t appreciate it’s fans around the world, they literally hit a wall. They were hemorrhaging money and talent because of scalability issues and in order to remain in business they had to make some drastic changes.

For the world (outside of the areas mentioned) this meant they could no longer use Twitter to blast information to large groups of mobile phones or use it with their favorite instant messaging client. Since they curbed this aspect of the service, Twitter has solved most of its downtime issues and they new have a solid plan for features they can reincorporate in the future.

2) Technorati

Technorati, the service that aggregates and indexes the world ‘blogosphere’ seems to forget that the blogoshpere exists outside of the the developed world as well. It’s not that Technorati can’t be used outside of the U.S….it’s just horribly slow outside.

I know the company isn’t floating in cash, despite having successfully raised new rounds of funding, but perhaps something could be done to speed up the website for users outside of North America and Europe? Maybe it should consider integration with Google’s browser-side caching service, Gears? Or perhaps local server caching, similar to how MySpace and Facebook are operating internationally. They also might consider following this advice.

3) Google’s Jaiku

When international Jaiku users began observing that the service wasn’t functioning the same outside of the U.S., they were disappointed. This was an even bigger letdown than the situation with Twitter because Jaiku is owned by Google…who one might think could devote more resources to serving its users around the world. When Twitter made their announcement about scaling back, Google seemingly strategically resurrected Jaiku to come to the rescue! Then, in an anti-climatic move, it had some problems.

Furthermore, I’m not sure why Google is developing Jaiku and Gchat as separate products. The biggest weakness Twitter has right now is that it rolled-back the ability to use its service with IM clients like Adium. Google already records and indexes Gchat conversations, why not go a step further and integrate Jaiku’s technology with Gchat? The user-base of Gchat far exceeds that of Twitter or Jaiku combined. It’d be an instant win, that is, if Google were interested in competing with this product.

4) Google Checkout

Another Google service that disappoints because of failure to meet expectations is Checkout, Google’s competitor of sorts to PayPal. I’m not faulting Google for failing to use Checkout for something needed like offering e-commerce solutions to developing countries, but what I do fault them for is having offices and data centers all over the globe and only offering Google CheckOut in two.

Checkout is obviously not adding to the bottomline of the company so obviously Google should focus on its profitable business aspects, but why even offer the service at all if it’s not going to be utilized fully?

5) Microsoft/Live/Hotmail

For a group that has all but indoctrinated it’s software products all over the developing world (in anticipation of emerging economies spending cash with them later), Microsoft has done virtually little in the area of offering translated software for the web. Sure, they’ve got their translation engine windowslivetranslator.com but they ignore all African languages and many other more niche languages from around the globe. Although many of Google’s services suffer the same faults, they did recently launch a focused effort at offer localized content in local languages. Microsoft’s browser reaches 70% of all internet users and they’ve done a great job of releasing language packs to support those diverse user groups, but what about Hotmail and their other web services?

I suppose the big disappointment here comes from the fact that I know they go out of their way to sell their software in areas where they don’t support the language at all. It’s a risky move because as applications move to the cloud, open source translation libraries will allow competitors to easily compete.

Also, unlike competitor Google, Microsoft seems to have no plans to developing locally cached data centers to speed up their services for developing countries. I suppose these markets aren’t big enough to get their attention.