The Social

So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.

To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.

But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).

Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."

Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.

This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.

It's complicated.

So just how do you say "poke" in Latin? It's "puncti," according to Facebook's newest language translation. The supposedly "dead" language--O.K., so the Others on "Lost" speak it sometimes--debuted as an official translation on the social network on Friday.

"Latin has joined the more than 70 languages we've made available on the site in the past two years, including some which have launched just today--Azeri, Faroese, Georgian and Nepali," a post on the company blog by Facebook's Elizabeth Linder read. "Some of these are languages that millions of people speak across the globe. Others are dialects that specific communities use in select geographic areas. Still others are just for fun: 'Pirate' may not appeal to everyone, but for those nostalgic for the days of Blackbeard and Captain Hook, it's there for you."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notably studied both ancient Greek and Latin in high school; interviews have said that when he enrolled at Harvard, which he ended up dropping out of to run Facebook full-time, he considered studying classics rather than computer science.

Most of Facebook's translations have been "crowdsourced" by users. Latin was a volunteer effort, too, according to the blog post, which must have been quite the operation considering the likes of Cicero and Ovid probably didn't use the term "news feed" colloquially.

"To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language," Linder's post wrote. "While students of 'living languages' practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto."

Conveniently, that ubiquitous Facebook term "status" is the same in English and in Latin.

Facebook made a dual set of announcements this week pertaining to Facebook Connect, the universal-log-in product that it offers to third-party developers and Web sites. Both are aimed at making Connect more ubiquitous: first, a tool called "Translations for Facebook Connect" that simplifies the process of translating the product into international languages, and second, the "Facebook Connect Wizard" for incorporating the product into a site with little developer expertise required.

Facebook first announced that Connect would be available in a multilingual format this summer. Now, the tool can be used to translate any site into the language of a given user who's logged in with Connect.

Last we heard, about 15,000 sites had implemented Facebook Connect, a product that statistics firm Hitwise says gave the social network enough momentum to propel it past once-bigger rival MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic. Launching international translations of the main Facebook site--which the company ended up "crowdsourcing" to users starting early last year--is largely credited with kickstarting the social network's growth overseas.

Facebook now has over 300 million active users around the world, a sizable majority of which are outside the U.S.

Plugging in Facebook Connect information with the three-step 'wizard.'

(Credit: Facebook)

"Establishing a presence on the social Web requires fundamental building blocks," a post by Facebook employee Alex Himel explained as it announced the Facebook Connect Wizard. "Facebook provides these essential tools, including identity for a great registration system, and immediate access to 300 million active global users. Facebook Connect gives entrepreneurs of all sizes--and with varying developer resources--the ability to build traffic efficiently through reaching a relevant audience, while offering an engaging user experience."

The new Connect Wizard takes only three steps, Himel's post said.

Another one from Facebook: The company announced Tuesday, just as it was about to take the stage in a "developer garage" event at the TechCrunch50 conference, that it has reached 300 million active users around the world.

Also: It's cash flow-positive.

"As of today, Facebook now serves 300 million people across the world. It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," a blog post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg read. "We're also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow-positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."

So I guess that's code for "no IPO soon."

Facebook hit 250 million users precisely two months ago, and 200 million users just three months before that.

Zuckerberg's blog post also highlighted a new trend in his rhetoric about the company he founded in 2004 as an undergraduate at Harvard: They run a tight ship. Or at least that's what he says.

"The site we all use every day is built by a relatively small group of the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs who are solving substantial problems and each making a huge impact for the 300 million people using Facebook," he wrote. "In fact, the ratio of Facebook users to Facebook engineers makes it so that every engineer here is responsible for more than one million users. It's hard to have an impact like that anywhere else."

Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg last month that Facebook hoped to increase its work force by 50 percent by the end of the year, but stressed that "the thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end."

This post was expanded at 1:19 p.m. PT.

Facebook announced Tuesday in a post on its developer blog that Facebook Connect--its universal-login product used by more than 15,000 third-party sites--is now available in an array of international languages.

"Developers who've implemented Facebook Connect, including those who have installed social widgets like the Fan Box, now have the ability to decide in which language they want their Facebook Connect features rendered," the post by Facebook's James Lezsczenski read. "When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify. User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written."

Facebook, which now has more than 250 million members around the world, began launching international translations of its site early last year, encouraging users to help translate the social-networking service into their native languages. This is when Facebook's growth around the world really started to speed up.

An investigation by Canada's Privacy Commissioner is concerned that Facebook is only paying lip service to members' privacy, and has called on it to do more.

"It's clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release Thursday, which explained that the investigation was spurred by a complaint from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC).

About 12 million of Facebook's 250 million active users are Canadian.

More specifically, Stoddart expressed concern that while it's easy for members to deactivate their accounts, it's less clear on how to actually delete them. Facebook therefore can retain member data from deactivated accounts for an indefinite period of time, which is in violation of a Canadian privacy law; Stoddart's office's investigation recommended that Facebook designate a time period after which that data is permanently deleted.

The report also suggests that Facebook tighten privacy regulations on its developer platform to ensure that third-party developers can't access too much personal information from the users who have installed their applications.

Here's something interesting from the release: "As a result of the investigation, Facebook has announced a new privacy tool for its site, which is aimed at giving users more control over who gets to see each item on their Facebook page."

Facebook launched those new tools in a conference call with reporters early this month. But the social network did not say at the time that there had been any impetus from lawmakers behind it.

"Facebook is pleased that the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner has dismissed most of the inaccurate claims brought by CIPPIC, and that we were able to collaboratively resolve other issues raised in the complaint," a statement from Facebook read. "The Commissioner also recognized, as we do, that privacy and user control on the social web is a new area, which requires websites, users and data protection authorities to work together. Without question, Facebook and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner's Office share the common goal of making the Internet more privacy friendly for Canadians and users across the world."

"As part of our continued leadership in developing privacy tools that advance user control over their information, Facebook will soon be introducing a number of new additional privacy features to its service that we believe will keep the site at the forefront of user privacy and address any remaining concerns the Commission may have," the statement continued. "In the meantime, we will also continue our efforts to work with the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner to address the outstanding areas highlighted in the report and will continue our efforts to raise awareness of the privacy controls on Facebook."

This post was updated at 11:04 a.m. PDT with comment from Facebook.

Least surprising news of the day: Facebook has officially grown to 250 million active users across the world, according to a post on the company blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made, and how far we at Facebook have to go to extend the power of connection to the billions of people around the world," Zuckerberg wrote. (The post is accompanied by an animation of how Facebook's growth spread around the world, which is pretty cool.)

Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million members barely over three months ago. Then, Facebook commemorated the occasion with the launch of a new nonprofit-focused initiative, Facebook for Good. This time, they're not launching anything fancy, just assuring members that they're continuing to develop and innovate.

"Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible," Zuckerberg wrote. "This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are--whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building."

Interesting that he specifically mentioned mobile development. Facebook's growth explosion as of late has been largely overseas, and some would argue that the next frontier for the massive social network would be to make better inroads into countries where people are more likely to be accessing the Web on a mobile device than on a computer.

Facebook Connect, which lets external sites use Facebook login credentials and some profile data, has been one of the company's most high-profile projects since debuting about a year ago. It's also been a big success, with some reports that the company may build a powerful advertising network around it.

And "other things" likely entail the social network's virtual currency system, a potentially lucrative product that was finally announced after much speculation but has yet to make any kind of formal debut or rollout.

It took about four months for Facebook to go from 150 million to 200 million members, and slightly longer than that for it to grow from 100 million to 150 million.

Also making Facebook-related milestones this week: "The Accidental Billionaires," the factually questionable account of the social network's early days at Harvard, debuted in bookstores on Tuesday and had cracked Amazon's top-100 ranking by the end of the day.

For Twitter, the past year has been a series of coming-out parties as it jumped further and further into the public eye. But it wasn't until this month's post-election upheaval in Iran that it became really clear: Twitter, you're not in Silicon Valley anymore.

"They have a responsibility that goes way beyond what they originally imagined," said Patrick Meier, director of research at DigiActive, an organization dedicated to helping activists better utilize new-media communication and networking tools. "This is a tool that can help communication in politically volatile situations."

Up to this point, much of the hype about Twitter's use in crises and disasters (as well as political events like elections) has been how quickly it can spread raw eyewitness reports, sort of the ultimate center for participatory "citizen journalism." There was the U.S. Airways incident in January, in which a photograph posted with Twitter app TwitPic was one of the first close-up looks at the emergency landing of a passenger jet in the Hudson River. When a wave of terror attacks sent the Indian city of Mumbai into chaos, many turned to Twitter for the most immediate information available.

In the aftermath of the contested Iranian elections, however, it's been Twitter's potential as a communications medium, rather than simply a source of up-to-the-minute news, that has been front and center. It's usurped Facebook as the social-media tool in the spotlight. The U.S. Department of State even requested that the company reschedule a planned outage so that it would be less likely to disrupt the flow of information coming from Iran.

"It's humbling to think that our 2-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance," a post on the Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone read.

Therein lies the uneasy truth: In a major international crisis, one of the prime channels of communication and news for individuals, media outlets, and governments alike is a 2-year-old start-up in San Francisco with 50 employees, no discernible business model, a history of technical instability, and a misinformation-related lawsuit on the table. This is a problem.

"It's just a start-up, and here they are playing geopolitics in some of the most crucial events we've seen recently, and that's kind of worrying," Meier said.

"There's definitely a risk...There are always going to be, I think, dangers in relying on all different kinds of technologies for many different reasons," Meier continued. "A related question to ask is, well, what's the alternative? The cell phones (in Iran) were blocked intermittently, Internet sites were blocked, (but) a few people were able to use Twitter. That was one of the last things that people were able to use, and when you're in that kind of an environment, when things are coming to a showdown, you use what you can and you try and do so as securely and as safely as possible."

The question now is to what extent Twitter, which has declined to comment beyond posts on its official blog, is obliged to step up its game. This is not always an easy question to answer.

It's ambiguous, for example, as to how much responsibility Twitter should take for the content spread over its network. As a communication platform, Twitter needn't be held accountable for the accuracy of everything that its millions of members "tweet." But it already has misinformation problems: Twitter has been sued by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over a Twittering impersonator, something that led the company to start rolling out a "verified" accounts program.

"Part of the way that I look at Twitter is much the same way that I look at citizen journalism, and chiefly the sort of early-breaking, unvetted citizen journalism," said Rachel Sterne, founder of user-contributed news site GroundReport. "You take it as an early warning system, you take it as a litmus test where something is happening somewhere in the world, and then the next step for responsible news gatherers is to check your sources."

But if La Russa's lawsuit is any indication, Twitter can't take a completely laissez-faire approach when it comes to accuracy. It's not Wikipedia, with an army of volunteer fact-checkers that manage to self-correct errors and hoaxes most of the time. When something is "tweeted," it's out there, it's public, and it's searchable.

In addition to the content on Twitter, there's the service itself, and it's a service that was once known for embarrassing unreliability. The days when a Steve Jobs keynote could turn Twitter into the famed "fail-whale" error message are over, thankfully, but vulnerabilities remain--the fact that Twitter required maintenance serious enough to disable its service for several hours, for example.

Unstable servers and fail-whales are just the surface, though. It's even less clear as to how effectively Twitter could handle large-scale denial-of-service attacks, phishing, hacking, or more serious forms of sabotage or cyberterrorism.

These are things that Twitter needs to be ready to handle internally, Meier said. He brought up the incident early last year in which a network in Pakistan knocked out the entire YouTube service for several hours. "A government didn't react, the U.S. didn't react, (and) there was no public relations or diplomatic reaction," Meier said. "All that happened was that YouTube found out about it, got their tech people in a room for a few hours, got YouTube back online and did it, and yet it was an international incident at the same time."

But the Twitter situation is very different, and not only because governments have started to take note in this situation. YouTube is a hosting platform that relies chiefly on other communications channels to spread the word about content hosted there: if it goes down for one reason or another, people can upload videos elsewhere. With Twitter, the technology itself isn't the only piece of the equation. What's equally important is the constantly updating, searchable mass of short public messages being broadcast and received around the world. This cannot easily be uprooted and replicated elsewhere.

Both the possibilities of mass misinformation and technical problems lead to another issue for Twitter: revenue. Pundits' calls for Twitter to get cranking on its yet-to-be-unveiled business model have turned into little more than a broken record, but the prominence of Twitter as a communications channel in the Iranian crisis raises the question of whether a pre-revenue company--no matter how cushy its venture backing--is up to task.

If Twitter is going to continue to have this kind of role in international affairs, it's going to need infrastructure so rock-solid that it drives the "fail whale" into extinction. It will need to hire employees with expertise in public policy and communications and a legal team capable of handling issues much more serious than a ticked-off baseball team manager. Those things take money, and this is a company whose co-founder once hinted that hiring an advertising sales staff would be too labor-intensive and costly.

Sterne, however, thinks that might be asking too much of Twitter. "I think the most important thing for Twitter is to focus on their technology and make sure their platform is up," she said. "They're not in the diplomatic game, and they're not a news outlet, so it's not up to us to hold them responsible for the content that goes across their network, it's up to us as consumers to be responsible consumers."

But, as Meier pointed out, turning things up a few notches could be in Twitter's own self-interest. If it doesn't make some moves to be ready for the international stage, it could be a major missed opportunity for the company.

"The activist will adapt if the environment changes," he said. "If Twitter goes down, they'll find something else."

A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.

"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."

CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."

His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."

Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."

Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.