I simply hate websites that think they are more intelligent than me and make the wrong assumptions about my persona such as MySpace or Blogger.com.
Currently, I’m living in Neuchatel, which is a small city located in the French region of Switzerland. In case you didn’t know, Switzerland has 4 national languages: Swiss German, French, Italian and Romansh. Both MySpace and Blogger.com apparently run some code which localises the content of their website to region where you’re accessing them from. Unless I log in and change the language settings, both websites appear in German or Swiss German (can’t distinguish them). This is very annoying because I don’t speak neither German nor Swiss German. It’s quite a mission to even work out how to log in! Once I sign in and change the language to English everything’s fine but I’m a sensible person and periodically delete my cookies so then, I have to do it all over again. Moreover, the code that these two websites run is stupid because I don’t even live in the Swiss German side of Switzerland, so if it was to do it correctly, it should guess that I’m in the French speaking side and show stuff in French. I’d have no problems with that as my French skills are much more advanced than my German/Swiss German ones.
Neither Facebook nor WordPress make such assumptions which is enough for me to love them. The rest of Swiss people might disagree with me and I can understand that they might be annoyed precisely for the same thing: because these websites are in English by default. However, if you’re gonna make assumptions about where I’m accessing your website from, do it correctly, otherwise don’t even bother. Harsh but fair.
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