TORONTO – The popular social networking website Twitter.com reported today low sign-up rates throughout Canada. Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone say Canadians often misspell Twitter by reversing the letters -er, similar to common Canadian misspellings of the words theatre and centre. Internet monitoring sources say the number of new Twitter users is growing rapidly in all English speaking countries except Canada.
During it’s initial launch, the popular social networking site, Friendster, also suffered a similar fate in Canada.
Founders of the photo sharing website Flickr.com said they anticipated this problem in Canada and decided to remove the letter –e to reduce confusion for the spelling-challenged Canadian public.
Twitter Founder Evan Williams commented, “It’s kind of hard for a website to be popular in a country where virtually 100% of the people appear to suffer from a basic spelling deficiency. The bottom line is Canadians are deprived of tweeting because the schools do a poor job of teaching English in Canada.”
Canadian bloggers, known throughout Canada as bloggres, have been working hard to inform the Canadian public about the correct spelling of Twitter, but Canadians have been slow to adopt correct spelling practices.