Europe is a pretty big place with little consensus on anything. Perhaps you should ask, 'How should you market your Web 2.0 application in the UK?', 'How should you market your your Web 2.0 application in France?' etc etc. The answers may be mostly similar however the differences could be very compelling.
There was a post earlier on YC about IPTV revolution ( <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996</a> ) happening in Europe. It seems to be ahead of the US in terms of marketing of the IPTV medium. This should obviously mean something -<p>
1. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters<p>2. TV shows in Europe are boring<p>3. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive<p>4. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium<p>5. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could be attributed to 1.<p>
The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe. <p>Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe?<p>Any thoughts on this one?
Facebook is quickly becoming popular in Norway without local translations. Other services like Youtube and Flickr is also very popular. We have local alternatives too of course.<p>What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base in Norwegian law.<p>You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number...<p>And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be displayed as Æ, Ø and Å)