If you feel like you can't keep up with what happens around you, you're not alone.

If you feel that most of the tweets on your stream are obscure to you, you're not alone.

If you didn't know about a great conference everyone is talking about, you're not alone.

If you miss lots of industry announcements and feel dumb when the news hit you, weeks later, you're not alone.

You're not alone, and you're actually in good company. You are missing lots of stuff because you're working hard. Because you're building something new, something that somebody will be talking about, someday.

You are building your own future, your own news announcement.

You're on the right track.

</seth-godin-mode>

I came to the conclusion that forums (or fora) are not a good way to provide customer support. They are perhaps a good way to engage the community, but not to provide support. Put it simply, they lack proper team features. You keep seeing threads as new even if someone else on your team has already responded.

In the end, it's a giant waste of time, not only because you have to mark as "read" several threads without even bother to read them, but also because it becomes extremely hard to find existing questions and answers.

A Stack Exchange approach would be good I guess, and there are open source projects that already use Stack Overflow as their only Q/A place. Sure, there are no "general" or "off-topic" discussions, but that's a pro, not a con. It's the only way to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Spam is another huge problem. We are seeing few automated spam lately, but more elaborate, human-driven messages containing just enough unique content to instill in you the doubt that the post is legit and that it's simply a clueless individual who posted it. Well, it turns out it's not the case. I mean, we get dozen of such messages each week, I just can't believe humanity has gotten so bad in so few time.

A few days ago I stumbled upon (funny how I don't remember how - was it Twitter? was it someone else's blog?) an interesting blog post about software localization, which is incidentally my company's business. This is the most important passage (emphasis mine):

"So this is the paradox – to fix localization bugs, someone must notice them, and to notice them, more people who know English must use localized software, but people who know English rarely use localized software. [...] Even people who know English well should use software in their language – not to boost their national pride, but to help the people who speak that language and don’t know English. They should use the software especially if it’s translated badly, because they are the only ones who can report bugs in the translation or fix the bugs themselves."

You can't imagine how that is close to reality.

For a starter, my three main PCs have Windows 7 and all software in English. My Android phone is set to use English as main UI language. The problem is, I am Italian but I just can't stand software in my language. It just feels weird. Moreover as a developer I often have to lookup error message on the Internet to solve problems and bugs in the software I write. It is way easier to find information in English than in any other language (well, except Chinese perhaps).

I am sure that this happens for everyone involved in the software industry. We just don't care about localization. The worst part of this is that even companies deeply involved in software localization don't care the least. Try to find one software localization platform vendor with a multi-language website. You'll find very few, if any.

Translation agencies and vendors are different. They do care, but they're linguists, not technologists, so that must be the difference. They love language like we love software, and they mostly ignore software like we mostly ignore language.

So we are working to build a tool that helps to do something we don't care much about. Well, this actually happens all the time in all industries, but it makes you feel a bit guilty when you realize that you're doing the same.