Our Delhi and Bangalore cities and our languages too
I took this picture a real long time ago, From one of our Yahoo! offices in Bangalore. After an agonizing wait, Yahoo! India Ourcity is out and is doing good. Many people have already covered this and you could check it our for yourself and conclude about it’s worth.
What is cool is, this product was a hack to begin with and was taken to completion in style by my friends in Bangalore. It is a beautiful example of the hack culture that is catching up inside of Yahoo! and you can expect many more of these meta sites (Should I say , mashups?) out of Yahoo! in the time to come. Ourcity will also add your city (Chennai, Mumbai et al ) soon, so wait and watch.
The picture above exemplifies the sort of thing we are trying to do here as Yahoo! India. We are trying to get closer to India, closer in a way that you would love. Did you notice Yahoo India Frontpage now carries content in about half a dozen Indian languages ( Tamil, Hindi,etc ) ? There was a time when I used to disagree on localization of content in India. My claim was not all that incorrect either. Read on.
There are about 300 million Indians who can read and write in English. Technically, they should be able to consume Indian content in English too. We probably have about 50 million people online in India. The power users will be much less. So, we have scope for another 100 million people (Not sure how many years that will take) easily before we can claim the growth is hindered by language. I put forward this idea to Jimmy Wales when he was in India a while ago and he sort of seemed to agree.
But, since then, I have a different mind set. I am starting to see that Tamil content makes a lot more sense and carries originality when read in tamil. It instantly becomes closer to my heart and I somehow tend to like it. Maybe, it is just that I am not used to reading tamil online and the novelty of that fact attracts me. Maybe, I am unintentionally trying to improve my tamil reading skills. But one thing that changed my perspective was, I was introducing “The Internet” to my mother the other day and one of the first things she asked me was “Can I read Mangayar malar ( A tamil ladies only monthly ) online?”. That was a killer. I had to change my mind.
Either ways, I am pretty excited about this entire development. And I hoping more and more people will volunteer to not just translate content in a local language, but create real content with the end audience in mind. An article about Brad Pitt makes very little sense in Hindi, you would agree.
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