Today we added a couple new preferences to user profiles, timezone and language. There is currently no use for these, but the likely uses are as follows.
Language
Languages are internally defined using ISO-639 and this originally applied to the title names. Eventually, there will linkage between a user’s language preference and the primary titles that appear on various pages (except on another user’s Experience Library).
A second usage of the ISO languages will be in variations (pages), which we will be able to select the proper page based on language preference. This is nothing new/special and it might be wise to route entire subdomains to various language versions of the site (similar to Wikipedia). It’s still undecided, but the page data will be portable.
Timezone
There are only a few areas which allow custom timestamping, but timezone selection will aid in adjusting properly to UTC. Currently, user-timestamped entries are expected to be adjusted to UTC (or rather, the system does not compensate if the ts is not UTC). This preference is more of a helper function, rather than a feature, and simply adds a bit of transparency to user location.
Notes
Custom timestamping is currently available through Microupdates and setting Experience. All other events should be timestamped to UTC.
