Today, Apple’s “best iPhone yet” hits the shelves in the following countries:

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

In countries on the Euro, the 16GB iPhones 4S is going to run customers around €600. For instance, in Luxembourg, the base price is €616. In The Netherlands, its €599. In Spain, €600. That’s around 850 U.S. dollars.

It’s important to remember that these are prices for the unlocked iPhone 4S. Wired’s Charlie Sorrel in Spain points out how this pricing points to the future U.S. pricing scheme of unlocked phones:

€600 is $850, and that’s for the 16GB model. It goes up in €100 step to top out at €800, or $1,133 for the 64GB model. For comparison, those are the exact same prices as the 3G iPad lineup, which will give you a rough guide to what the U.S prices will be when the unlocked phone goes on sale there, probably some time in November. Up in Canada, the unlocked prices run at $650/$50/$850 (thanks, Jon!), which should also let you see where things are headed.

The iPhone 4S has sold well in The U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it is without detractors. Some customers have reported that they are disappointed with the lack of change from the iPhone 4, especially when it comes to the physical design.

But the phone still broke records when it went on sale.

The top three draws of the new iPhone 4S are Siri, the personal voice assistant, the incredibly impressive 8 megapixel camera, and its quicker processing.

iPhone 4 is currently available in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model and $299 (US) for the 32GB model. See more HERE

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A glance at the world map of social networks 2010 you see above shows a clear picture of the colonization (for want of a better word) of Europe, for instance, where Facebook has displaced its competitors in France (Skyrock used to be #1) and Germany (StudiVZ, although they might argue the rank).

Map author Vincenzo Cosenza provides an additional view, showing the top three social networking sites (SNS) in nine countries:

An interesting aspect is how Twitter appears in this list: in second place in Australia, Canada and the UK and third place in France, Spain and the US. I’ve always seen Twitter as a social network as opposed to simply a micro-blogging tool; it looks like many others do as well.

Still, in global domination of online social networks, it looks very clear that Facebook reigns supreme.

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He highlights what Yahoo and Google (respectively) search engineers Priyank Garg and Greg Grothaus had to say about the matter:

Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content across domains, noted that Yahoo! does not filter duplicate content out of their results when the works are found on multiple ccTLD domains. Greg confirmed that this is also how Google’s engine behaves and, with the exception of potentially spammy or manipulative sites, reproducing the same content on, for example, yoursite.com, yoursite.co.uk and yoursite.com.au was perfectly acceptable and shouldn’t trigger removal for duplicate content (assuming those sites are properly targeting their individual geographic regions).

Fishkin also notes that for usability and conversion reasons, it’s best to localize languages anyway, just to create a better user experience. Vanessa Fox (formerly of Google) has a very in-depth article on "Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers," which also discusses the issue. She recommends the following:

- Putting content for each country on a subdomain or subfolder. (Either is fine; but  if you’re starting from scratch and have a choice, I’d generally suggest going with a subdomain.)

- Including location-specific terms in internal anchor text. For instance, you might want to create an HTML site map that links to each country’s “home page” on the domain.

Fox’s article contains a ton of additional useful information on international SEO, an important topic for any business looking to expand their customer-base around the globe.

Country-specific TLDs can contribute to relevancy factors that potentially make your site rank higher according to Fox. While there are exceptions, the subject is something definitely worth giving some thought to.

For one, they have released Cross-Language Enterprise Search on Google Enterprise Labs. It instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more others using Google’s translation engine.

"Wondering if your Paris office has some documents in French that might be relevant to your search?  Frustrated that your first language isn’t English, yet 90% of your corporate documents are in English?  Now users can search in their native language, but find every document within the enterprise on the topic," explains Cyrus Mistry, Google Enterprise Product Manager. "In addition, you can choose to have the results come back in any language and you can even translate the search result snippets (or documents themselves) into any language!" More details here.

Another release from Google is the Google Blog Gadget version 2.0. They released the original version of this gadget back in September. It is basically just a way to keep up with new posts on all of Google’s corporate blogs. This is a useful gadget to a guy like me, who tries to stay current on all things Google. One problem I had with this gadget was that a good percentage of the posts coming through were in other languages that I couldn’t read.

They have corrected this problem and made the new version translatable into a number of different langauges. Those supported include: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Now you can just chose the category of blogs you want to read and click "translate." By default, they translate into whatever language your browser is set at. Of course, the usual translation issues are likely to still come into play.

"So, what do we in this global village have in common?" asks Google VP Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer. "Mainly a strong interest in socializing and politics. Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone’s interest around the globe. Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin, may have lost in the election, but she was the #1 fastest-rising query on our global list (Obama was #6)."

Let’s look at that global list:

   1. sarah palin
   2. beijing 2008
   3. facebook login
   4. tuenti
   5. heath ledger
   6. obama
   7. nasza klasa
   8. wer kennt wen
   9. euro 2008
  10. jonas brothers

As far as the U.S. is concerned, Google provided the following information:

I would have expected the Jonas Brothers to make a top ten list here in the U.S where they are myesteriously absent., but I’m a little surprised to see them make it on a global scale. I apparently have a lot to learn about the Jonas Bros.

"Today, I’m happy to announce our first employee in France, Damien Vincent," writes Blake Chandlee on the Facebook Blog. "Over the next few months, Damien will be building a sales team in Paris in recognition of the increasing desire by companies in France and nearby countries to make advertising on Facebook a part of their growth strategy. Companies such as Peugeot and Dell already have Facebook ad campaigns running in France, helping people discover new products, explore ideas and share with their friends."

Doug Caverly reported on Facebook’s international growth last week, citing some data from O’Reilly radar:

According to Ben Lorica, there’s been a 17 percent rate of change in North America over the last 12 weeks, but only Africa failed to tie or improve upon this number (showing a 15 percent rate of change).  Oceania, Central America and the Caribbean, Asia, South America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe generated rates of 17, 22, 32, 33, 45, and 49 percent, respectively.

 U.S. Share Of Facebook’s User Base Shrinking
(Credit: O’Reilly Radar)

A couple months ago, Facebook announced it would be making Dublin the location for its international headquarters, but France has quite a solid user-base of its own. "While Facebook en Francais has its own flavor, we also embody the global connectedness of Facebook," says Chandlee. "Our average French user has 72 friends, of which more than a dozen live in other European countries, the United States or additional international locations. We feel more closely connected to friends all over the world because of Facebook."

I would expect to see increasing international operations from Facebook over the coming year, making Facebook truly a global community.

- Spell corrections
– Diacrtical marks
– Synonyms
– Compounding
– Stemming

If only it were just that simple. I find the concept of how they do this stuff fascinating, but quite frankly it is so complicated to me, it makes my head hurt thinking about all of the things that would go into the improvements. Google Blog Engineering Director Daphne Dembo goes into much more detail at the Official Google blog, but I’ll just let you read that stuff there. She concludes, however:

All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I’ve covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

I’ll say this much. This is definitely important work for Google to be doing to truly dominate the search engine industry all over the world. Here in America, we often take for granted that Google’s not the head honcho everywhere in the world. China for example, prefers Baidu. The more improvements Google continues to make at an international level, the stronger the company’s future will be around the globe.

The WSJ is reporting that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to follow a common set of principles that will govern how they do business in countries that might restrict free speech.

Under the new principles, which were crafted over two years, the technology titans promise to protect the personal information of their users wherever they do business and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy,” according to the code. They also commit to scrutinizing a country’s track record of jeopardizing personal information and freedom of expression before launching new businesses in a country and to discussing the risks widely with their executives and board members.

The pact has the blessing of some groups–such as Human Rights First and Committee to Protect Journalists–but criticized for not going far enough by others–such as the World Organization for Human Rights USA.

So, which side are you on?

1. This is a great agreement and shows that these internet titans take our privacy and freedom of speech seriously. Or,

2. The wording is too loose and doesn’t actually prevent Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft from complying with the countries they operate in.

3. Something else on your mind?

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