Mloovi is a new tool which will translate RSS newsfeeds into 24 languages. It does this via Google Translate but the process is utterly seamless. You just put an RSS feed’s URL into the box and that’s it. The service is going to be of great use to bloggers (who can also download a widget to have their blog automatically translated). Since the service is a mashup of Google Translate the translations are not perfect, and there are no images or formatting, but they do give you the gist of the article. With the Olympics coming up it should be especially useful to track all the chatter from the myriad of nations attending.
Is there a business model for Mloovi? Perhaps not as a pure Mashup of Google Translate – that rather locks the service into to a powerful player. But note that while the basic service is free of charge, mloovi inserts one advert into the feed. That will give it some kind of ad inventory. If you want to have these adverts removed you’ll be able to sign up for a premium account to do this, in the time hnoured traditions of the fremium business model.
But the real value is in acting a bit like a Feedburner for the rest of the planet: you can claim your RSS feed in several languages and thus start attracting much more international traffic to your site. It doesn’t have all Feedburner’s tools yet but I can see that developing. This would generate more lock-in among users. You could alwys burn your Mloovi feed back through Feedburner to gain more analytics of course.
This new site has come out of the same pack of Brits who created the Learnitlists language learning widget. They very kindly credit me with the original idea for mloovi because I recently Twittered that I was looking for just such a service. Mloovi is a transliteration of the word ‘to speak’ in Czech (mluvi).