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Update 4 : Twitter is now supporting the German language.

Update 3 : Twitter is now supporting the Italian language.

Update 2 : Twitter is now supporting the French language.

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it’s only available in English and Japanese.

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter’s growth in new users. The company doesn’t plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that’s just a starting point.

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we’ll follow up technically," says Stone.

"We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," he explains. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we’ll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Our latest numbers have shown that new user registrations have declined slightly for Twitter. The more languages that Twitter supports, obviously the more useful more people will find it. It has a long way to go to get Facebook-like numbers, but this would be a huge step in the right direction (along with the forthcoming "lists" feature) to step up the game.

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Google has launched a new API for Google Sites as a Google Labs feature (meaning it may have some flaws). The Google Sites data API allows client applications to access, publish, and modify content within a Google Site. It is available to both Google account and Google Apps users.

Right now there is only one supported version of the Sites Data API. The documentation, available here, includes a protocol guide, a reference guide, and language guides corresponding to the client libraries.

The API lets you do things like:

    -  Retrieve, create, modify, move, and delete pages, comments, attachments, and other content.
    – Review the revision history across the Site.
    – Monitor all add, modify, and delete activity for a Site.
    – Upload/download attachments and files.
    – Create customized gadgets for your users.

Google also names some specific ways the API could be useful to businesses. You can update Google Sites from 3rd party applications. You can migrate files and content from workspace apps. You can export Google Sites pages, edit them offline, and re-import the update content. You can export your sites for backup, easily monitor changes across your important internal and public sites from a single gadget, and you can push new content to any site on your domain (including sites created by individual employees).

  "Best of all, while this API is brand new, application developers will find it rather familiar – it is, after all, a Google Data API," says Anil Sabharwal of the Google Enterprise team. "And like our 16 other Google Data APIs, this one comes with all the standard protocol support around authentication and querying that you’d expect. You’ll find everything you need to get started on the Google Code pages, including links to documentation and sample applications."

Sabharwal also points to the open source import/export project on Google Code and SharePoint Move for Google Apps as applications that are already built on top of the Google Sites API. The former lets you export entire sites as static HTML, while maintaining the structure and page hierarchy, and the latter was developed for migrating data and content from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites.

If you make your own application, Google suggests promoting it in the Solutions Marketplace.

Update: Google’s Marissa Mayer has now announced the product officially, and named it Google Fast Flip.

Original Article: Google is reportedly launching a new lab in Google Labs called Flipper, which takes Google News to a much more visual place, by showing news stories as thumbnails of the actual pages they reside on.

TechCrunch managed to get a screenshot of the service, which is apparently only available on a password-protected server at this point, but said to be launching soon, although we haven’t heard or seen any official comments from Google.

Google Flipper (Via TC)

Based on the screenshot, you can see that you can browse by section (politics, business, US, World, Sports, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, Opinion, Travel) as seen on the left-hand side. At the top are tabs for "recent," "most viewed," "recommended," and "headlines." At the bottom are tabs for different sources, which should make for an interesting way to read stories from specific sources you like.

It’s a little hard to say much about the service before it has launched and anybody has had a chance to use it, but it looks like it has quite a bit of potential. It’s hard to tell how the "big publishers" will react to this, but I doubt any widespread controversy will come of it either way as long as it is only a lab. However, when labs are perfected, they do have the potential to become full-fledged features.

On the other hand, it is possible that publishers are partially behind the lab. "I’m going to guess that Flipper may be something that Google developed in conjunction with publishers, who have lobbied for more visible placement in Google News and contended their brands have been diluted and their content ‘devalued’ by intermingling on Google News with random blogs and no-name sources," speculates Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. "The assumption might be that seeing the branded pages will yield better response for these publishers, who assume their publications are more trusted by consumers, and so on."

Speaking of getting more visual placement in Google News, the company has recently posted a FAQ page for Google News publishers, which does touch on image inclusion. If publishers have images and they’re not showing up in Google News, the company lists some possible reasons:

- Your images are hosted on a different domain from your main site (for example, your articles are at mynews.com and your images are at myimages.com)

- Your images are too small, or the aspect ratios are different than what we look for

- Your images aren’t inline (i.e., they’re clickable)

- Your images may be too low-resolution

- Your images may be positioned too far from your article titles

-  Your images may lack captions

Those are guidelines for all publishers though. This does not exactly solve the problem for "big publishers" Sterling mentions. If Flipper is only for big publishers, it could certainly go a long way to highlighting the big brands in Google News, should it ever become an actual feature and not just a lab. However, that would start a whole new argument (or the same old one, depending on how you look at it) from the smaller guys.