Re: mini writeup: Orkut "looking for" I18N/L18N issue

I've seen a similar situation with "interested in" attributes, where a  
user picked "women" assuming this was her indicating an interest in  
issues related to women, rather than indicating a sexual orientation.

S

On 19 Aug 2009, at 13:01, Dan Brickley wrote:

>
> per # [CONTINUES] ACTION: danbri to write up orkut/i18n/"looking  
> for" issue ...
>
> Here's a quick writeup. I will try find my old email files with more  
> detail on this:
>
> Short version: be careful in Social Network site UI if you use  
> ambiguous phrases like "Looking For" that in practice have a dating/ 
> sex reading, but the UI doesn't make that clear. The subtlety may be  
> lost on users unless the UI is carefully translated to their  
> preferred languages. And it may have serious real-world consequences  
> if they mis-represent themselves as having characteristics that are  
> controversial in their country.
>
>
> Some years ago (2004-5), Google's Orkut social network became very  
> popular in Iran. It has since been heavily blocked at the ISP there,  
> but for a while was widely used. At the time (and afaik until today)  
> there wasn't a Farsi/Persian UI available for Iranian Orkut users,  
> so they had to manage as best they could with other languages. I  
> don't know what the options were, or how multilingual the interface  
> was back then, but English was the default. So, 1000s of Iranians  
> were filling out user profiles on Orkut, where the meaning of each  
> field wasn't always clear.
>
> Browsing around, I noticed a very large proportion of Iranian users  
> had filled out their profile indicating they were lesbian/gay or bi- 
> sexual. Noticably more than users from other countries. A Google  
> staffer ran some stats and confirmed that this was indeed the case.
>
> My reading of this situation was that many users were mistaken and  
> had mis-represented themselves. My Google contact - after some  
> consultation - suggested instead that the site had somehow become a  
> hub of lesbian/gay community, and that the profiles were accurate.
>
> I wish I had the old mails handy, to be clearer about this specific  
> case. I think the UI had a profile field that (implicitly) related  
> to dating, something like:
>
> "Looking For: [ men / men and women / women / ... ]"
>
> ... though I forget the exact options, the ordering and the default.
>
> My reading was that many of Orkut's Iranian users had missed the  
> dating aspect of this field. Hard to prove either way, but I still  
> think it's worth writing this up. I think there's a best practice to  
> be articulated here. Declaring yourself (accidentally) to be looking  
> to date "men and women" can be seriously embarrassing (or worse,  
> illegal) in some countries. And this is of course irregardless of  
> whether there's anything wrong with being gay/bi/whatever (which  
> there isn't).
>
> hope this is useful,
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
>