For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

I’ve started vague plans in that direction which will hopefully coincide with my rapidly-approaching 30th birthday.

But in the meantime, I’ll be at South by Southwest in Austin TX from this Thursday. The interactive portion of the festival will mean actual work for me, schmoozing with people who make me feel tremendously stupid in comparison, and speaking a couple of times.

If you want to see me and my new haircut fumbling their way rustily through public speaking, you can catch me at the following times:

Monday March 10th, 7-9:30pm - 20×2 at The Parish, 214 E. 6th St., Austin TX

Tuesday March 11th, 5-6pm - “Taking Over the World the Flickr Way“, Room A, Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez, Austin TX

The second event is the one which has me stressing manically over slides, being an hour-long presentation by little ol’ me on exactly how we turned Flickr from an English-only colossus into a globe-spanning 8-language slightly-bigger-colossus.

I promise that, as much as such things can, it’ll be fun.

In the vast pantheon of multinational corporations, few are more hell-bent on willfully causing international confusion and consternation than the Hershey’s empire.

Even after two years on the West Coast, as a Brit I am still not 100% sure what lies under any given tastefully-designed candy bar wrapper.

For example, let us take the American staples “Milky Way” and “Three Musketeers”. Both fine blends of sugar, fat and various unnatural syrups for sure. But for me, years of childhood wonder must be suppressed in order to remember that, in fact, what Americans call “Milky Way” is marketed in my homeland as a “Mars Bar”. Meanwhile the American “Three Musketeers” is, in the Land of Tea and Questionable Dentistry, a “Milky Way”.

(A note for the pedantic: “Three Musketeers” is not exactly the same as the British “Milky Way”. The British version has denser nougat, but there’s a definite shared design ethic going on.)

The transposition of these names is particularly, egregiously confusing, but they’re not the only Hershey’s confections to suffer from odd transatlantic translations.

I am convinced that somewhere in the Product Naming Department of Hershey’s there is a small and slightly odd little man by the name of J. Edgar Grosderriere. As a boy, J. Edgar had an unremarkable and perfectly happy early childhood; a close-knit group of young schoolfriends; loving and supportive parents. Unfortunately, around the age of 8, J. Edgar’s class began studying the French language. With a distressing inevitability, J. Edgar’s classmates quickly improved their French-to-English translation skills. In just a few short months, J. Edgar was forever re-christened “Hugeass” and his daily life plunged into a maelstrom of misery and torment.

Bereft of confidence in the face of his ridiculous moniker, J. Edgar has never known the love of a good woman, preferring to spend much of his time sequestered away in laboratories full of chocolate. As a result he’s developed a few eccentricities, the worst of which is the tendency for his sexual frustration to spill over into his work.

Hershey’s management have considered letting J. Edgar go. They’ve considered quietly rejecting all his suggestions for candy names. But he cuts such an odd figure that he evokes a real sense of pity in all who know him.

“The guy’s named Hugeass for God’s sake. How much harm can the odd strange candy name do?” they say to one another.

This, at least, is the only way I can plausibly explain the American names of my two favourite childhood chocolate products, known to me in those more innocent days as “Malteasers” and “Bounty”.

Not for the American market such benign and innocent names, oh no. Thanks to the sorry history of J. Edgar Grosderriere I must instead seek out the pleasures of “Whoppers” and “Mounds”.

Yes, “Whoppers” and “Mounds”. It is hard for me to eat these things with a straight face. Furthermore, I have discovered, it is hard to eat without a straight face - your teeth end up in weird places. Be that as it may, I have little choice if I wish to savour chocolate-coated malted biscuit or candied coconut. Because every single time as I’m opening the packaging, the product name emblazoned on the side, my head fills with bad 70s porn dialogue and “bowchikkabowbow” guitar lines.

“Oh wow. I can’t get enough of those Mounds. Now, honey, get ready to wrap your mouth around a Whopper…”

It was one of those “blinding light” moments - the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”

I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.

It’s not like I’m the first - the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”

Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.

There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.

Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest - “gotta catch ‘em all” - you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.

Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…

…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time - for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -

1. Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
2. Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
3. Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).

I care in some way about every single one of the people I added on Facebook, but I don’t want to answer their movie quizzes, become their “zombie victim” or engage in an online “food fight” with them. And here’s the ultimate kicker - for the people I really care about, I have (or should have) far more direct contact with them - phone calls, personal emails, real-life meetings; all of which render the fairly cursory, sterile experience of a Facebook exchange irrelevant. And if anyone else wants to get hold of me, it’s not hard to find me - search engines have a pretty good idea of where I am, for one thing.

We’ve forgotten something in the Great Web 2.0 Social Circlejerk, and that is: you can only really have a small number of true friends, because friendship takes time - meeting, communicating, supporting… there’s nothing lonelier than having 200 “friends”, and realising that you couldn’t really turn to a single one of them if the bottom fell out of your world tomorrow. I’m reminded here of a line from Mary Schmich’s “Wear Sunscreen” (as immortalised in the incredibly cheesy Baz Luhrman track)…

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.

Many people will probably disagree at this point, which is just fine, although as the days whizz by I find myself hearing “Facebook is annoying” from more and more people. But here’s the real kicker about Facebook, and the inspiration for the title of this post…

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

I logged on this morning, resolving to kick Facebook into touch, and looking for a “delete my profile” button. Only there isn’t one. Instead, you can “deactivate” your profile.

I decided to do that, and went through the form which asks about your reason for leaving and then pops up patronising DHTML prompts which attempt to counter that reason. Then I came to the checkbox at the bottom of the form - “Opt out of Facebook emails”. I’ll need to paraphrase here as I no longer have Facebook access, but it was explained along these lines:

Your friends will still be able to tag photos of you, and invite you to groups and events. Check this box if you’d like to opt out of notifications of these events.

Huh. So if I leave Facebook, stuff can still happen on my profile, even though I’m no longer there? That feels… wrong. I completed the deactivation, but was curious… if I reactivated my profile, what would happen?

Reactivating is a case of logging in, and then clicking on a link they email to you.

Click… and “bam!”, there was my profile, complete with all the contacts, groups and “zombie invite” clutter there’d been before. Clearly, truly quitting Facebook takes work. Lots of work.

To opt out of any friend-related activity, it seems that you need to actually delete those friendships. Three clicks per delete - the “delete” link, an “Are you sure?”/”OK” exchange, and another “OK” to dimiss confirmation. 375 mouse-clicks to drop those 125 nodes on my “social graph”… plus more to actually dismiss the zombie crap, leave groups and generally close things down. Just the thought of it gives my brain RSI.

This is, plainly, an unforgivably shitty user experience. I don’t expect any service to insist that once I have an account, I will always have an account - not my bank, not an online retailer, and certainly not something as inessential and inconsequential as a social network.

It also belies a stunning level of insecurity. “Lock-in” is the last refuge of the weak - a tactic used by people convinced that their service is so awful that everyone will up and walk away if they don’t force them to stay. Prisons have locked gates for a reason; Facebook (if they’re as truly confident about the “essential” nature of their service as they say in public) should not.

I’m really interested as to how this plays out in the long run. Facebook has more hype than you can shake a stick at and a strongly-rumored big queue of Big Money at the door. Furthermore, as Google’s stock price tops out and its “Don’t be Evil; have a free gourmet lunch; take 20% for a personal project” culture dissipates under the inevitable strains of growth, Facebook is becoming the Hot New Place for smart developers to pitch tent and get to work.

They may yet do something truly revolutionary, or tweak the model so it actually appeals to grumpy old bastards like me. If I were them, I’d lock the API down a lot more and insist on reviewing apps before they’re allowed onto the site - rather like console manufacturers do with games. Cut the deluge of useless apps, and concentrate on the ones which actually add value.

Facebook, as it is, is just unbearable in a way that even MySpace (for all its unreliability and layout hideousness) just can’t muster. Even though it was a chore to quit it, I feel better already.

I’m periodically fascinated by how people view online life, and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or perceive) on the internet, versus that “other” life with the blue ceiling and the third dimension.

My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.

I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on Flickr’s support forum, all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences overlap with work) is totally unrelated to my place of employment.

I can very well imagine the route they took - they saw my posts on the forum, followed them to my profile, and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…

…To me, such an action is the online equivalent of visiting a local store, and rather than resolving an issue at the “Customer Service” desk, instead following a store employee home, knocking on their door and asking for resolution of your issue then and there.

The two simply aren’t connected, and making them so leaves me feeling a little unsettled. Yes, I work as an engineer for a popular website, and yes, I occasionally pitch in to help with people’s concerns and worries, especially when my fellow Flickr-ers are out of commission for one reason or another.

But… that’s my day job. When I come home (or post on hitherto.net), I really don’t want my work life to follow me there.

I feel the same way, incidentally, about my Flickr stream - even though I work on the site, I don’t expect people to take my personal little corner of it and attempt to vent their frustration or seek a resolution through it (any more than I’d expect them to come to the office in person and berate me in the break room).

It’s very easy to see online entities as impersonal “machines” - many sites have even cultivated that image, seemingly as a way to streamline their customer interactions into manageable processes. Flickr has, in fact, tried to avoid that where possible - most of the staff still pitch in and try to offer assistance on the site’s forum, and we try to be polite and efficiently helpful whilst injecting a little humour and personality into the mix.

So, a quick plea to the world in general - when you’re seeking assistance online, please do try to apply the same boundaries to your interactions as you would in real life. Otherwise, you’re going to trigger a quick blog post and very little else in response.

The “Penguins Only” photo on this post is from QuestingBeast on Flickr.

This is the ninth (and final) part of a series on setting up a financial plan.
The beginning of the series is here.
The previous article is “Financial Tools: Budget Tracking/Planning“.

So here we are, all set up with the right tools to build a better financial future. Hooray! But now that the initial hard work is (mostly) over, it’s time to step back for a moment and get some perspective.

All the plans, account setups, expense reductions and general thinking about money I’ve done in the past few months has changed a lot of my perspectives.

I don’t walk into a store and blindly buy things I want right now any more, because every dollar I spend is a dollar that could be working for me elsewhere. And I’m truly grateful for the change, because it will have a marked positive effect in the future.

But like all new interests, obsessions and endeavours, it’s easy to get carried away and become single-minded about them - checking spreadsheets every 30 minutes, and vowing never to spend a red cent on anything ever again - because it could be invested.

Being obsessed has been good for a few months - I’ve put in a lot of spadework and made a lot of decisions which set me on the right path. But now it’s time to let those decisions and tools work for themselves, and think a bit more philosophically about how my life and my finances mesh together.

For me, the quintessential point to base this thinking around is my snowboard.

It’s actually less than 2 years since I first strapped on a board and pushed my way down the green slopes at Kirkwood, discovering in the process that I was much better on a board than I’d ever thought I could be. That first season was one of discovery (first painful crash, first successful lift exit, first run all the way down a hill without falling on my ass…), and the winter 06/07 season was one of falling utterly, absolutely in love with boarding.

The trouble is that snowboarding is an expensive pastime for a city dweller 3 hours from the nearest slopes. Factor in transport costs (gas or possibly airfares), lodging costs, lift tickets, resort food prices and equipment costs and you’re looking at easily north of $1000 per season.

$1000 is a lot of money, even more if you consider what that $1000 could do with compound interest over 20 or 30 years…

The new, finance-obsessed me could very easily say “look, you should give up the snowboarding and save the money instead,” and, from a purely logical dollars-in-the-bank perspective, he’d be right.

But I love boarding with a passion that’s hard to describe. I want to experience the thrill of whizzing through beautiful winter scenery every second that I can - so much so that we’re still nearly 3 months from season’s start and I can’t stop thinking about it! I was excited this Wednesday by unseasonably early rain, because it dumped up to 2″ of snow on Tahoe and just maybe (superstitiously, unreasonably) promised an early season start or, at least, a good season for 07/08.

To deny myself the joy I get from boarding might allow me to increase that money tenfold in 30 years, but it would also leave a huge hole in my life, denying me experiences, satisfaction and memories which will last forever.

Which, strangely, brings me full-circle to the maxim I used to use to justify burying my head in the sand over money - “Life’s about more than dollars and account balances.”

Although the maxim is the same, the application is different now - I know what my dollars are up to, and I have the tools and the beginnings of the knowledge to maximise that which I choose to save. But I also have passions to pursue, and no wish to turn into Ebeneezer Scrooge.

It’s a delicate balance, one which will require fine tuning for months and years to come. But it’s one I think I’ve settled into already.

The “Snowboarders at Timberline” photo on this post is from frozenchipmunk on Flickr.

This is the eighth part of a series on setting up a financial plan.
The beginning of the series is here.
The previous article is “Financial Tools: Net Worth Planner/Tracker“.
The next (final) article is “Finance: A Little Perspective (and some snow)“.

One final financial tool that I’m finding invaluable - a budget tracker.

One of the things I’ve realised over the last couple of months is that I’ve often spent money without really taking note of where it’s going. This was most apparent when I was trying to estimate my weekly expenditure for my Net Worth Planner. I knew pretty much what I spend, but I had no detailed idea of what on.

The only way to find out was to start detailing my spending down to the last cent, in a way which allows me to review it, and trim any unnecessary outlays. You could do this with a spreadsheet, but that quickly became cumbersome, so I turned to dedicated software for the task.

There are quite a few options out there - the venerable market leaders are Quicken and Microsoft Money (with the former garnering better reviews, on the whole). Since I’m almost wholly mac-based these days, I also tried out a couple of cheaper mac-specific options, Cha-Ching and iBank.

Cha-Ching was the first out of the gate since I picked it up insanely cheaply during their initial introductory offer. It’s a beautiful-looking app, and has some good features (adding “tags” to expenses is a good way to slice them, for example), but it was lacking in the area of tracking cash expenditures, didn’t have enough in the way of simplifications for recurring vendors/payments, and didn’t provide great overviews of expenditure over time. It was very nearly there, but not quite…

iBank, on the other hand, does exactly what I need it to. Managing account transfers is a breeze, the categorisation of expenses turns out to be just as useful (and in some ways simpler) than Cha-Ching’s tags, and the killer feature is the charting of expenses over time. Looking at this, I can see, for example, exactly how my food costs break down, by creating a pie-chart of the last month’s spending for all the relevant categories. In this way, it’s easy to see just how much I’m spending on eating lunch or breakfast out during the work-week, and motivate myself to bring food from home (or eat breakfast there) more often.

This isn’t a recommendation per se - different apps work for different people, but I prefer iBank.

For the first few weeks, I just tallied everything I spent, even cash expenditures (which go against a dedicated “Wallet” account entry). This in itself was a powerful motivator - it’s a lot harder to forget/forgive frivolous expenditure when you have to tally it all somewhere.

The real benefit, though, came a few weeks in as spending patterns started to emerge, recurring (but variable) bills turned up and I began to get a full overview of where my money was going.

The insight has allowed me to re-evaluate all sorts of spending, and has led to some direct changes:

• I changed my DSL and home phone service plans, cutting their monthly cost in half.
• I’ve started cooking batches of food and freezing the majority, taking them to work and saving $5-$10 on lunch each time.
• I was motivated to cancel the gym membership that just doesn’t fit into my lifestyle at present.
• I’ve switched banks, eliminating a bunch of annoying and unnecessary fees (and incidentally earning a much higher rate on my core savings).
• I’ve cancelled a wine club which, while nice, has left a stockpile of bottles which will take me 3-6 months to drink, minimum.

None of these things, in themselves, saves that much money per month, but it’s enough to notice, and over a year it will save me well over $1000. Not bad for 10 minutes each day updating my finance app…

The next step, now that I have over a month’s worth of data, is to build a reasonable budget for myself (which the app can do specifically), and see if I can pare it down further without living the lifestyle of an ascetic monk. We’ll see how that goes…

Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor, and I’m just sharing my own financial plans because, well, I like to share. It’s also a good exercise in “thinking out loud”. You choose to follow any advice in these posts at your own risk, though - I’m not responsible if you overdraw or suffer other financial calamity…

The iBank screenshot on this post is from IGG Software’s website.

This is the seventh part of a series on setting up a financial plan.
The beginning of the series is here.
The previous article is “5 Accounts, #5 - 401(k)“.
The next article is “Financial Tools: Budget Tracking/Planning“.

Apologies for the slight hiatus - one day I’ll find the “sweet spot” combination of lifestyle, organisation and motivation to write on a regular schedule. Until then… sporadicity rules…

Last time I posted on personal finance, we wrapped up my summary of the 5 types of account I think I’m going to need for my nascent plan.

With that done, it’s time to look at the tools we’ll need to build and execute that plan.

Today, it’s the turn of the Net Worth Tracker and Planner.

What’s a Net Worth Tracker?

Put simply, a Net Worth Tracker is a spreadsheet, website or application that you can use to track your Net Worth. I like to think of it (somewhat macabrely) as the sum total your beneficiaries would get if you accidentally fell off a cliff tomorrow.

Your “Net Worth” includes every major financial balance in your life - the value of any cars, the equity you have in any homes, the sums of your retirement accounts, savings, checking accounts, wallet, investments and so on; as well as your debts - credit cards, loans, mortgages, etc.

A Net Worth Tracker is an invaluable tool in getting a better grip on your finances because it’s a (maybe sunny, maybe brutal) “quick sweep” overview of your current financial health, and a great way, by filling it in week-to-week (or month-to-month) of reviewing progress towards your financial goals, or seeing the effects of missteps.

How do I build a tracker?

Since I’m lazy, I’d say that the best way to go about building a financial tracker is to use a spreadsheet, and to follow Trent’s instructions over on TheSimpleDollar (which I seem to keep pimping here. Nevermind.)

The rest of this post will make less sense without the context of that one, so go read it now. Trent covers the basics very well, and following his suggestions will get you a basic net worth tracker which is highly useful.

My own practice deviates somewhat from his, though, in two key respects:

(1) I have two trackers - one monthly one (exactly as Trent describes), and one weekly one which, whilst fluctuating quite a bit with the vagaries of rent cheques and salary deposits, keeps me very close to what my money is doing.
(2) I also have a “planner”, which actually lives in the same spreadsheet as my weekly tracker, and follows the same principles, but is projected forward to encompass what I should be doing with my money over the coming year or so.

Making Projections

To build my net worth projections, I have a bunch of extra fields in my “projector”, besides the usual account balances. I have rows to cover paycheques in, payments to various debts, “other income”, rent payments, and weekly expenditure - food, small bills, entertainment… (which I set as an estimated average constant).

My “net worth” projector then becomes a set of formulae taking these money movements into account - for example, the weekly checking account balance becomes [previous balance] - [weekly expenditure] + [paycheck] - [loan payments] - [other expenditure] - [movements to other accounts].

You can also automate other balances with formulae - “Auto loan”, for example, becomes [previous Auto loan balance]-[Auto payment]. If you participate in an employer’s ESPP program or 401(k), you can set up a formula which will increment the value for each week where a paycheck is present.

Once the formulae are set up, I can easily work out the effects of different financial decisions by just changing the amounts in the “in/out” boxes, to come up with an optimum plan for saving, investing and debt repayment.

Stock options (and other investments) can provide something of an uncertainty - they’re subject to movements which are (relatively) unpredictable. For these, I look at the past year’s trend and calculate the value accordingly (so if your investment portfolio gained 8% last year, use that.)

This will give you the “bones” of your financial plan. For rows which aren’t automated, I generally fill them in with a formula which is simply “=[previous column]“. This way, as you decide on the structure of debt payments, for example, you can just alter the relevant columns, and the balances in between will remain.

Now is the time to do that. Look at your debts (particularly those without a structured repayment plan), and your checking/savings balances as the plan predicts them. Wherever you have “spare” money, you should look to insert a payment into the plan, reducing your account balances and your debt load. Once the “Debts” line on the sheet hits zero, things get really fun - you can start taking the money which was going into debt repayment, and push it instead into other accounts. First off should be your Emergency Fund, then any possible increase in 401(k) contributions; finally, you can start building up an investment account.

The advantage of this is that I’ve now done the bulk of my financial planning work for the next year. Every few days I check in with the planner and see where I should be with money movements, repayments and so on. It’s a no-brainer. When the plan says to pay down the auto loan, I pay the damn thing down…

I also build 2 graphs from this spreadsheet - one mapping my actual balances, and incorporating the “net worth” line from my planner (this way I can see, week on week, if I’m meeting, exceeding or falling behind my goals) - and one which maps the entire plan (because looking at how it should pan out motivates me to make sure that it does.)

And that’s the real key here - as well as being a useful blueprint to follow, ultimately a planner is a massive motivator to make the right financial choices, day in, day out.

Once you get it down, it gives you a real, solid feeling of power over your money.

Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor, and I’m just sharing my own financial plans because, well, I like to share. It’s also a good exercise in “thinking out loud”. You choose to follow any advice in these posts at your own risk, though - I’m not responsible if you overdraw or suffer other financial calamity…

The “Money” photo on this post is from Monochrome on Flickr.

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr - the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news - I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

This is not a new observation, but it’s something which just popped back onto my radar, sitting as I am in a hotel in Seoul, Korea.

Google really did introduce a horrible flaw when they first internationalised their site; one which hasn’t been corrected to this day.

The flaw is simple: they assume (seemingly by IP detection and nothing else) that the country you’re in is the language you speak, and that you will get a site localised in that language for as long as you’re surfing the web from there.

Whilst only mildly annoying when in, say, France, this is utterly disastrous for most western travelers to places like Korea, because we have no idea what the page is saying. Even worse, there’s no obvious way to navigate back to the English site, barring a small link on the site homepage (which you won’t see if you’re visiting the results page from a browser plugin; and is still bloody useless if you’re, say, German).

It’s always interesting when a company like Google - feted for their flawless execution, makes a schoolboy error like this, because it tends to reveal interesting things about that company’s culture.

In this case, it belies a certain arrogance, a “we know best” sort of attitude in forcing you down a path without really trying to work out what you might want. They don’t look at your site usage history (which they cookie to death, so there must be room somewhere for “is usually happy using the site in English), or your browser’s default language (less unreliable than it used to be), or… well, anything. “We know best, and we can’t be arsed to help you.”

As I say, there are some routes back to a site you can actually read - the link on the homepage or visiting the site via www.google.us (or .co.uk, or whatever - still no good for browser plugins). Somehow, these make it worse, though. Even a half-assed solution is an admission that there’s a problem somewhere; and if you know there’s a problem, why not… just fix it properly?

Yahoo! goes in completely the opposite direction with localisation, providing fairly “siloed” international sites, one for each territory they operate in, each with its own URL. This nicely sidesteps the issue of Google’s “forcing” a localisation on you without really knowing which one is suitable, and it allows Yahoo! to develop versions of a product which are truly geared towards the national community which they’re trying to serve, rather than seeming like an ivory-tower Silicon Valley linguistic concession to the rest of the world.

The major downsides are potential duplication of effort (is uk.answers.yahoo.com really different to answers.yahoo.com?), and the tying of language (or, more properly, localisation) to jurisdiction and other internationalisation concerns, which can marginalise sizable populations of foreign-language speakers who are living abroad. I believe this last point is only becoming more important as global mobility continues to increase.

These issues all interest me because I had to make my own decisions about them when designing the international model for Flickr, and (perhaps predictably), with Flickr we tried to take a more flexible “middle path”.

It’s not the kind of thing which should be readily apparent to visitors of the site, if I’ve got it right because it should “just work”.

On Flickr, we try to take into account your browser settings, where you are, where you came from (if you arrived from an external site) and various other factors to provide what I hope is a pretty accurate “best guess” at the correct language to serve you in (and, seperately, the best “place” to tie internationalisation concerns to).

As a fallback, every page (barring our really complicated javascripty maps and organizr features) has a set of links - in native language - to help you get to the language you want, if needed.

They may all be small markets, but ultimately I want to cater to the German living in Missouri, the Frenchman in Seoul and the Korean in São Paulo.

There may well be flaws in the approach as it stands today, but if so I hope they’re fixable (and I’ve not seen any negative feedback on language weirdness, so I assume we’re doing okay). Certainly, I hope that, unlike Google, our efforts aren’t a definite FAIL.