think latin1 = think small.

It’s an old joke, I’ve always herd it by americans:
- How do you call someone that speaks two languages?
- Bilingual
- How do you call someone that speaks three languages?
- Trilingual
- How do you call someone that speaks one language?
- American.

No pun intended. It’s a joke.

But, I’m always amazed by US-based web start ups that don’t support unicode. Why think small?

I’d happily switch to Pownce, IF I could write in Greek. Unfortunately, I can only write in latin1, which leaves out Greek, as well as Cyrilic alphabet, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. I stick to twitter.

I’d give a chance to Yahoo! Mail -if UTF-8 support didn’t suck so much. GMail, GMail, Gmail.

I’d base a web TV channel I’m involved in (with a possibly huge audience in Greece) on Brightcove -if only I could write video titles and descriptions in my language. I’ll have to put up with YouTube’s limitations.

Oh, well. On the other hand this leaves a lot of space for some competition :-)

One Response to think latin1 = think small.

  1. So true. And i scratch my head when it comes to companies like Yahoo!, i just don’t get it.