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"According to stats just released from Twitter, more than 60% of Twitter users reside outside the United States. International expansion has been on the rise since last year, when Twitter began launching in languages other than English.\nIn October 2009, Twitter announced it would be releasing versions of the site in different languages and asked for volunteers to help with the translation process. \nIn November, the site became available in Spanish, launching shortly thereafter in French. \nDecember brought Twitter to speakers of Italian and German. But Twitter's focus on an international audience predates any of these releases; Twitter Japan will celebrate its second birthday later this month.\nMatt Sanford, Twitter's lead engineer for the international team, wrote today on the Twitter blog: \n\"In the days following the tragic Chilean earthquake, people turned to Twitter to establish much-needed lines of communication. Signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians like Piedad C\u00F3rdoba Ru\u00EDz began using Twitter as a platform to speak to constituents. Signups in India have increased nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 due in part to politicians like Shashi Tharoor and Bollywood mega-stars Sharukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Abhishek Batchan. We partnered with Bharti Airtel, India's largest carrier, to ensure that a large portion of India's 550 million cell phone users can send and receive tweets via SMS at standard rates.\"\nBecause of the company's translation and outreach efforts, Twitter has been able to expand to reach an entirely new segment of the population. Their global traffic stats are beginning to look more like Facebook's. \nIn fact, we told you a couple months ago that half of Twitter messages were in a language other than English. Since June of last year, Twitter users from outside the U.S. have grown from less than 45% of all accounts to a stunning 63% majority.\n\n\n\n\n\"This is just the tip of the iceberg,\" Sanford wrote. \"We continue to work hard to enable new languages and new partnerships around the globe and we look forward to seeing what happens as we make it easier for the whole world to communicate over Twitter.\n\n\nFor more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/04/08/international-twitter/>