Ok Facebook, it’s time to realize that you are global, MUI baby…

MUI, or Multilingual User Interface, is the technology that Microsoft Windows and Office, as well as other applications, use to deal with multiple languages. So what does this have to do with Facebook? If you are the global icon I am (laughs), you obviously communicate with people all over the world. I have been trolling this old internet since the early 90s and my travels on IRC, message boards and usenet to name a few, have made me friendships that cross the entire globe.

These days, many of us manage these friendships with Facebook. Following my friends’ feeds and seeing what they post and comment on allows me to be somehow closer to them, and stay involved in what they are up to. I love it.

The problem comes in when you have many friends who use multiple languages regularly. Facebook knows what language I speak, they obviously know what language my friends speak, why don’t we go ahead and bridge the gap already.

This morning, I took a look at my feed and saw

Not being fluent in Hebrew, and the fact that it was 6am, what I thought I saw was

and are now friends.

But come on, it was 6am, honest mistake right?

Now I know that might not be the most culturally sensitive, and I mockingly apologize, but at any given time, my friend feed is populated with comments in Spanish, Hebrew, Russian and Norwegian, and those are only the common ones.

Working at Microsoft, Language translation is a huge part of our job, at this point in our development stage, many of the bugs we encounter are simply “this doesn’t look right in x language.”

If Facebook is ready to be a global meeting ground, it’s time that they address this.

Submit this post to

• Ignore People – or making the most of social networks
• What Facebook taught me about friends and high school
• Why Facebook user names are good for you and Facebook
• Why Facebook is no threat to Twitter and Vice-Versa…
• Myspace vs. Facebook: The Metaphor
• Comment and Webmail Mini Rant
• Microsoft on the Mac and Google’s OpenSocial