hashtags

Tweetdeck just pulled ahead in the race for designing a better Twitter application.  A recent update has, in my opinion, taken the company to the lead of the pack in “…racing Seesmic to see who can be the most innovative social media browser across multiple social networks.”

That quote up there comes from a post on on Read Write Web earlier this month. Marshall Kirkpatrick does a great job of breaking down and critiquing the new functionality set – the good with the bad.

But here’s the thing he missed.  Our friends at Tweetdeck just changed the game.  Twitter.  Global communications. The way we do business…

Tweetdeck kicks ass.

Multilingual Communication on Twitter & Facebook & MySpace
Some of you in Columbus Ohio know of Ohio Web Leaders or OWL.  When our group has breakfast meet-ups, we often tweet meeting notes and reactions to the speakers using #OWL so others can follow from home.  Now check out this Twitter search on #OWL.  You can usually find a few Tweets like this one in German.

I’ve actually used Babblefish to manually translate some of these tweets.  Apparently, #OWL is also a widely adopted hash tag for a specific geographic region in Germany.  But in order to learn that, it took manual effort and time.  Effort is plentiful but my time is spread thin, so I moved on after one translation and forgot all about it.

The result was potential missed opportunities to connect with good people across the globe on Twitter, simply because we didn’t talk the same talk.  Chances are some of these missed relationship opportunities may have led to interest in talking about how they could use TweetMyTime for an international marathon.  Who knows?

But Tweetdeck is innovative, and came up with a translation tool that hacks through language barriers.  This could potentially change the game forever.  From a communications perspective, it’s BIG.  Really BIG.  Here’s an example:

And to translate…

Then, all you have to do is click send…

And there you have it, folks.  In three clicks, Tweetdeck makes it easy for me to communicate across language barriers all over the world.  Users have the option to automatically translate Tweets in a variety of different languages around the world, including German, Japanese, Albanian and, hell, even Hebrew.

As far as I can tell, this only works for messages you are pushing out.  I haven’t had much time to play with it just yet, but the ability to translate incoming tweets is going to be a critical next step in widespread adoption of this new feature.  It may even already be there and I’m just missing it.

Fishbowl Just Got Bigger
Chris Brogan wrote an awesome post called Rules of the Pool a few weeks back, referencing the still relatively small community of social web users.  Here’s the quote:

“So, if I can’t figure out your rules of the pool, how are we all getting our panties in a bunch over what companies can and can’t do when they visit our little watering hole? (And it is little. Don’t let the clear glass sides of our fishbowl fool you.)”

One potential glass wall in communication is language barriers.  Another exists in the time and effort it takes to communicate messages.  With the translation release, Tweetdeck could shatter both of these, and in doing that, expand the glass walls of the global fishbowl.  Again, BIG stuff here for global communications.

What would you do in a world no longer constrained by language barriers?  How would that change your business practices?  Thoughts?

{ 2 comments }