MatrixAdapt | Logiciel de gestion d'Entreprise, Création et référencement des sites web

Have you been holding off on using Google Friend Connect because your site isn't in English? Starting today, Friend Connect is available in 47 new languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Portuguese. Now you can easily add social features that match the language of other content on your site.

Most Google-created gadgets (such as the members, comments, and recommendation gadgets) are now available in these new languages. Some developers have also created gadgets that support additional languages and we hope that there will be more to come in the future. To see a list of gadgets available in your language, visit the gadget gallery.

When you add Friend Connect to a new site, it will default to your primary language. But if your site is in another language, simply select it on the site settings tab and Friend Connect will automatically render the gadgets in that language. And if have multiple sites in different languages, you can select a different language for each of your sites.

To learn more or see the full list of languages, check out the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.

‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’

We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.

To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>

This script tag will load the google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>

When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.

Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.

Cheers,
Jayashree and Zareen, Search Quality Team, Google India