Last night I typed up a massive post which I then lost when my PC crashed, about how US websites like Yahoo! when transposed and localised for non-english speaking countries are similar in some or many respects to re-dubbing episodes of Seinfeld or Frasier into those same foreign languages. The raw content is conveyed but the cultural references, humour and more subtle nuanced meanings are either lost in the translation process or just don't make sense to non US viewers.
Anyway, if I find the time and inclination I'll re-write it again - if I can remember it all. In a word processor, not in a fragile browser application that flicks you the finger whenever you hit a glitch. Here's the draft of the first part that I did manage to save, if you'd like me to re-write the rest of it then leave your votes in Comments or send me an encouraging email. Or discouraging, I'm up for both.
The bleeding edge of the Web, or to abuse another metaphor - the front of the train of the Web - is naturally in the United States for at least some of the reasons I gave last week. And so it follows that the majority of the tech market leaders and players are US based companies such as the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, AOL and Apple.
All of these companies have been pioneers on the Web to greater or lesser extents. Mostly greater. They have established conventions and ways of using the Web that have been adopted and accepted the world over. For example, Yahoo! is available in over thirty regional and international flavours, each in it's own language but all with that same familiar Yahoo! branding and layout, many of the same basic features and all organised in a very similar way to the main, US Yahoo.com site.
On the surface, regardless of which version of Yahoo! you're looking at, it's a boilerplate design, and who can blame Yahoo! for that since it works perfectly in the US which, to-date, just happens to be the largest and most demanding Web market in the world, so why bother fiddling with a winning brand formula? It should be said that there is, of course, more to Yahoo! Taiwan than just Yahoo.com content translated into Taiwanese, there's plenty in the way of localised content such as news, local resources and many Taiwanese websites that don't appear in Yahoo.com's indexes. But despite that, the look and feel of Yahoo! Taiwan is unquestionably based upon the main US site design.
The same for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and so on. I suspect that this has more to do with marketing departments desire to control their precious brands as much as it is to re-utilise proven design concepts.
The United States has been a test bed for those companies, it's allowed them to launch, fine-tune and evolve some of the most successful websites on the planet and they have used their domestic success to roll out their business enterprises globally with classic first mover advantage. For example, it will come as no surprise to find that the biggest online retailer of Amazon type products in the UK is Amazon.co.uk, not a domestic ground-up business.
This isn't intentional hegemony and it's not a part of some insidious plan to Americanize or assimilate the world but nonetheless, the after-effects may be somewhat similar.
Seinfeld is on record as having been biggest sit-com of it's era in the United States right up 'til it finished in 1998 and, along with countless other successful US sitcoms, has been translated into many different languages for syndication accross the world.
Bloody Windows Me flake-o-matic operating system.