The Brazil Effect

There's a Reuters story from last month about the issue.

I'm fascinated with this phenomenon. I'm glad it's happening, and I suspect it will be like this forever. Brazil this year, who's next year? Americans are already just another minority of the world's total internet user population. According to this site, native English-language speakers using the Internet number 287 million, whereas non-English speakers number 516 million.

But think about this for a sec: you don't see any articles about Americans descending in droves onto Brazilian websites, taking over their online communities. Not many Americans know Portuguese. Funny how people in other countries learn multiple languages, and are able to proficiently use an English-only website such as Orkut or Fotolog. (Why is it, in America, politicians and pundits portray language proficiency as a negative, as unpatriotic? I remember in college, you could take Fortran and it would qualify as your second-lanaguage requirement. What a joke. Fluency in multiple human languages is a great and valuable skill. Perhaps America will finally discover that as the century wears on.)

For my own startup, I'm thinking seriously about the Brazil phenomenon and what it means for boosting the priority of internationalization and localization (or "I18N/L10N" in Netscape-speak). You can't count on everyone being able to read English. Can a web company today afford to turn away potentially thousands or millions of customers simply because the site is limited to English? Used to be, I18N and L10N were version 2.0 / version 3.0 features... now web startups need to seriously consider making them 1.x features, if they want to stay competitive and be prepared to support the embrace of a global internet user community.