Twitter appears to be preparing to roll out a feature that would automatically translate posts into your preferred native language, according to a Twitter page I saw today.

Last October, Twitter's Biz Stone authored a blog post that indicated that Twitter would soon be arriving languages beyond Twitter's native English and Japanese, including French, Italian, German, and Spanish. But that post, I believe, was designed to announce translations to the Web site (including words like "following,") rather than translating the posts themselves.

The results page (from one of Wednesday's trending topics, "Bloodbuzz Ohio") allows a user to filter a tweet by language, from Arabic to Icelandic to Thai. But just above that appeared a clickable option to translate the tweets on the page to my preferred language, English.

That may be because one of the tweets that appeared on the page was posted in Dutch. Unfortunately, clicking the "Translate" link didn't work this morning, but by this afternoon it had, with the translation supplied by Google, as you can see in the graphic below. There was also an option to expand the short link to the full URL, without actually being forced to click through.

There are several Greasemonkey scripts that perform auto-translation of Twitter tweets, but this is the first time I've seen a native Twitter auto-translation function. If Twitter begins to overhaul its search results with the auto-translation, URL-expansion, and the new popularity priorities, the Twitter experience may radically changed over the next few months.

Originally posted to AppScout.

TECHNOLOGY

 

Mattel taps into social media craze with Puppy Tweets

The high-tech toy will post one of 500 canned tweets to a dog's Twitter page after it's triggered by a sound and motion sensor worn on the animal's collar.

Dog owners are provided with a USB receiver that they connect to their computer. They then download the toy's software online and create a Twitter account for their dog. When the dog moves or barks, a signal is sent from its Puppy Tweets tag to the receiver, which updates the dog's Twitter page. (Mattel / February 4, 2010)

 

 

So you create a twitter account for your dog and it sends one of 500 pre-defined tweet to update its twitter status. Cute. Considering some of the stuff I see tweeted these days it probably blends in very well.

We might have to wait quite some time for a canine social network called barker, updates sent as barks and rebarks and geo-tagged photos from a collar-cam sent to your dog's growlr (flickr) account. But the whole area of tweets linked to monitors of physical conditions- motion, temperature, heart-rate, blood pressure, weather and so on is likely to lead to some very interesting and practical applications.

 

 

 

4 Cool Ways To Make Use Of Twitter Lists

Nov. 30th, 2009 By Mahendra Palsule

 

Earlier, we saw how to create, discover, and follow Twitter Lists. Now let’s see some more useful and fun ways how to use Twitter lists.

Lazy to build a List? You can auto-create a Twitter List of people you converse with. If you are an avid RSS feed reader, wouldn’t you like to import Twitter Lists into Google Reader? How about embedding a List Widget on your blog? Finally, some fun stuff to show what your Twitter Lists say about you!

 

This has to be the ultimate twitter resource.