So many features, so little time
Mar. 21st, 2008 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurSorry about so much CommYou burbleage today, but the news is proving really interesting for me.
Today's new feature in the story list (albeit down in the backlog for the time being) is automatic translation. This is suddenly looking plausible due to Google announcing a new Translation API. Using this, I ought to be able to include translation in my UI cheaply. You say that you prefer to read in English. Someone comments in your journal in Chinese. The UI automatically detects that the comment is in Chinese, and when you go to read it, translates it into English. (Probably fairly *bad* English, mind, but still more useful to most people than the original Mandarin.)
Until now, that would have been a major pain in the ass, but from the sound of things, I could probably now implement it in a week, maybe even less. And the potential for spreading conversations internationally is *really* cool. Today, nearly all conversation systems are balkanized along languages lines. Heaven only knows what the effect of breaking that down would be, but the potential is really neat.
God, I love the modern Internet biz. It's hectic and crazy, and hard to keep up with, but it's fun as hell to be in the middle of...
[ETA: Y'know, I'm going to have to think about when I do this. On the one hand, it's a fringy kind of feature; OTOH, it's something nobody else does, and it's potentially kind of revolutionary. I'll need some "revolutionary" to make a splash when the system hits release time, and this is one of those features that could get a lot of press. Hmm...]
Today's new feature in the story list (albeit down in the backlog for the time being) is automatic translation. This is suddenly looking plausible due to Google announcing a new Translation API. Using this, I ought to be able to include translation in my UI cheaply. You say that you prefer to read in English. Someone comments in your journal in Chinese. The UI automatically detects that the comment is in Chinese, and when you go to read it, translates it into English. (Probably fairly *bad* English, mind, but still more useful to most people than the original Mandarin.)
Until now, that would have been a major pain in the ass, but from the sound of things, I could probably now implement it in a week, maybe even less. And the potential for spreading conversations internationally is *really* cool. Today, nearly all conversation systems are balkanized along languages lines. Heaven only knows what the effect of breaking that down would be, but the potential is really neat.
God, I love the modern Internet biz. It's hectic and crazy, and hard to keep up with, but it's fun as hell to be in the middle of...
[ETA: Y'know, I'm going to have to think about when I do this. On the one hand, it's a fringy kind of feature; OTOH, it's something nobody else does, and it's potentially kind of revolutionary. I'll need some "revolutionary" to make a splash when the system hits release time, and this is one of those features that could get a lot of press. Hmm...]