Babelfish Twitter

As all my friends know, I'm something of a twitter addict. I regularly spend certain amount of time per day on it checking other people's tweets and I tweet almost everywhere I am, thanks to Blackberry dataplan and a number of wonderful twitter clients available for that platform like ubertwitter and twitterberry (I have both. Don't ask why). Contrary to some of the popular opinion on twitter being unnecessary time-waster I find it an interesting tool to keep in touch with academic communities and enlightening people around the world. If anyone cared to look, they'll find surprising amount of meaningful conversation on variety of topics like artificial intelligence and synthetic life taking place on twitter time to time. They are the kind of conversations normal mortal like you and I won't be privy to if it weren't for twitter or its very close cousin friendfeed... Who knows, maybe some of the people on twitter or any other number of social network platform out there got the chance to hear the conversation between future Einstein and Tagore... I should definitely do a post on the development and practices of science in the internet age sometime soon.

As a bilingual one of the more interesting thing about twitter is how so many people outside traditional U.S. internet service sphere of influence seem to have no trouble picking up twitter and turning it into part of their daily routine. So far I believe I saw about seven different languages on twitter with their own little communities, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, a bit of Arab, and a number of languages I don't quite recognize. This is quite surprising that traditionally it's very difficult for a web service from one particular nation to break into other cultures/nations due to variety of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.

So here I am, thinking how would we be able to use this growing database of all sorts of different languages and cultures? How would twitter community and the twitter administrators be able to encourage such diverse usage demographic so that we have more people speaking multitudes of languages on a single network? My American friends might be unable to understand this but the fact is, despite the presence of the internet as an international unifying medium people from different cultures and languages tend to be locked into their own proprietary communications service protocols within it. For example, vast majority of internet users outside of America don't really use facebook. And vast majority of people outside America don't use Google as their default search engine. Likewise people in each respective internet ecosystem tend to use their own service that none of us have ever heard of. Twitter, for some odd reason, seem to be able to transcend that traditional barrier for some odd and as of yet unknown reason...

Would first step in such a venture be building a type of sorting engine into twitter capable of differentiating between different language input? And gradually grow that system into something capable of translating one 140 character snippet into another language of equal substance? The 140 character limitation might impose some interesting mechanism on the whole computer based automatic translations service.

... There seem to be something incredibly awesome at the end of this tunnel, but at the moment I seem to be rather incapable of figuring it out...