Another drab part of web development

Last week I read that Flickr has 525 million photos now (which is nuts) and 55% of Flickr users reside in non-US countries. That means ~289 million photos come from outside of the US. And that’s before they added any multi-lingual support just last week, which amazes me (I could never use an application that’s in another language, even if it’s image-based).

I’ve already mentioned what I think is the worst part of web development, but I’ve since thought of another candidate: internationalization and/or localization (I think they’re the same thing). The reason I can’t explicitly say this is ahead of or just under deployment is because I’ve never actually done it. I know there are plugins (for Rails, anyway) that assist in this issue, but even so. Easy or hard, I’m glad I don’t have to worry about it. I just think it’s a boring problem.