IM Chat to go regional
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UPDATED 5th OCT, 2006 - It seems the web is getting more and more competitive each day and no feature can stay exclusive for too long. So as soon as the international IM players like yahoo and Msn have announced plans to go regional our very own rediff.com which has a messenger service called "Rediff bol" has launched a messenger service in hindi. The method of choosing ‘Rediff Bol in Hindi’ is very simple and user-friendly, one needs to choose Hindi from the list of languages on their chat window, which is available as a dropdown menu. I guess it wont be long before we see this area of IM’s getting even more competitive as going regional means deeper penetration for these big portals which in some ways creates new users and markets for them.
UPDATE 22/09/06 - MSN India along with its revamped portal msn.co.in has also launched regional language options to the portal. MSN India is available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. They have also launched the Windows Live messenger in these 5 languages. more on this can be read here
Its seems that localisation of content would be the next wave in Indian internet scene and not without reason as according to the recent IAMAI and IMRD Study smaller metros and towns are increasingly embracing the Internet evolution and are pushing growth from below. Smaller cities and towns have shown a whopping 142% YoY growth and now account for 25% of all Internet users.
So after Google which has been offering vernacular search facilities for quite some time now we have its arch rival Yahoo which is all set to launch its instant messenger (IM) in Indian languages enabling thousands of Indians to chat with each other in own regional languages or mother tongue. IM is the third most popular application on the Internet after e-mail and search. Google search engine offers search in five Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. However, its chat is currently only in English.
The launch of this regional chat facility is expected to happen before the year-end and i expect the other IM’s like Google Talk and MSN to follow this trend.
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The blog post protrays as its not at all possible to chat in tamil/indic language using current IM clients. I can chat in tamil using Google Talk English version. For chatting in own regional languages or mother tongue, one doesnt necessarily have localized version of messenger. Although localized version helps in increasing but that is not a show stopper.