“We’re confident that it works because we’ve been testing it now for a couple of years,” he said. “And so we’re really ready to start rolling it out.”

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom – a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity – said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread,” he said.

Read more here:

International Domain Names: Internet Set To Add Non-English Web Addresses

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Imagine a community website taking leadership of the WWW – yet this is happening as you read those lines.
Facebook is growing fast +220% this year reaching 122M uniques in July. Google leads with 147M uniques BUT it is absolutely inevitable Facebook will win this battle.

Google is facing serious attacks from Microsoft with Bing.com. Yahoo! has remained solid behind Google despite the Ballmer/Chen fiasco. Google’s numbers are stable but no real sign of growth despite a rise in search queries.

Facebook has doubled its uniques from 66M in January 09 to 122M in July 09 and I see a peak of uniques starting right after summer holidays. Millions of pictures are going to be posted to Facebook. There is one ironical fact: 1st source of incoming traffic on Facebook is….Google. Maybe Google will react to that and start pushing Facebook results a bit further down.

FaceBook will be #1 site in the world by December 09. INCREDIBLE.