Hello,

This is Brian from Der Mundo. Several people have commented about our choice to use Facebook Connect and I'd like to respond to that.

We don't require a login to view translations, but to edit translations we do. Requiring users to login under some sort of verified identity does two things: it rewards good behavior (we can credit translators, show their pictures on a map, and so forth), and it discourages anonymous trolls. It is also easier for users if they can log in using an existing account versus creating yet another account. We went with Facebook for the initial release because so many people are already there, its easy to use, and is also widely used to share links.

We do plan to support other systems, including Wikipedia (we are working on a proposal for a signin process that will enable users to login with their wikipedia account, while our system will get information about a users access rights in wikipedia and weight their submissions). Google, Linked In and Twitter are also on the plan.

For now, we are focused primarily on the following tasks:

* fixing what's broken (often someone else's html) * adding crowd funded professional translation and more machine translation options * adding social features, such as showing translators for a page on a popup or map * identifying a few initial affinity groups who will use the system heavily (we already have a group forming to translate LGBT news and blogs for example)

We'll add more signon options once we have things running smoothly and have the core features in place. We're very much of the release early, release often mindset, so we will be adding more options. Google signon is pretty easy for us to support since this runs mostly on App Engine, so that will probably appear fairly soon. The other services are somewhat harder to connect to, so we'll probably get to them a bit later.

BTW, we are looking for people who are leaders among various affinity groups (for example, people involved in reporting news from the uprising in the middle east) to create translation communities. It is easy to do with services like Google Groups, Listserv, etc to curate content and organize translators, while Der Mundo is useful as an editing and link sharing tool. I'd like to see a group emerge to translate art related sites and blogs. In any case, there's lots of interesting stuff out there that currently remains bottled up in its source language.

Thanks again for your feedback. It's helping us sort out priorities as we work on the service.

Brian