“But I can’t speak Vogon!” “You don’t need to. Just put this fish in your ear.”

While tracking mapchat’s popularity I’ve noticed that one of the major factors of accumulating chatters on the map is some not-so-mystical critical user mass. It seems that once the map hits a certain number of dots, their number will grow exponentially until reaching a high stable number of users. This happens because the higher the amount of people is — the higher the fun factor gets, and since the fun factor makes the users stay longer, this creates a feedback system that drives the popularity up!

Trying to analyze the reasons that get mapchat to the required critical mass, I found that the language barrier is one of the factors that drive the user session duration down. In the last few months, mapchat got a major part of it’s traffic from Non-English social networking sites. Every time someone shares mapchat to his social circle, a sporadic stream of users start flowing to the site, and streams of users from the same Non-English speaking clique tend to stick with their native tongue (You probably noticed that on Facebook and Twitter too). This created a situation where different social streams almost never interacted with each other, and the critical mass was less likely to form.

In order to eliminate the communication barriers, I started looking into Google Translate API, thinking of translating the messages on the server side. I came to the conclusion that this approach is way too expensive for a 0$ budget project and less elegant than letting the client side do the translation. I was super excited to find out, that the old Google Website Translator Gadget interacts quite well with dynamic websites and could be integrated with zero effort into mapchat. All I had to do is just paste these 6 lines into the main page, and there you have it, a free multilingual translated chat! Keeping with the project motto of maximum functionality with minimum complexity this change even drives mapchat’s value/effort ratio higher.

Google Translate in action

If you have suggestion for the next features I should implement, feel free to add them on the project issues page.

Discuss this over the map