Ebay, Paypal, Orange do not care about their users, customer experience or service. They just want your money.

 Listen, Google

What part of "preferred language" do you not understand?

Every browser has a list of languages the user would like to see, in order of preference. I even tried to remove French from this list, but

No matter what I do, when I am in France, my language is set to French, except where I can change them manually (gmail, google apps).

photo www.ronmartin.net

Ok, this doesn't affect huge numbers of people, but hey, a lot of social networking folks are on the road a lot.

I just tried to join Social Wok using my Gmail address and then my Google Apps addres. Both are set to English. Yet, in both cases, French was imposed on the initial signup and it isn't changeable. (The signup submit was shown in French, I can read French but what if I was in Turkey, China or even Germany?)

So, I brought up a proxy, making my IP look like it was in New York, and guess what?

Google now shows me as an English speaker. Dammit, what about the browser prefs I set to English?

Make it easy for users to change language settings and retain these

If you can't find a way to read the browser settings and respect these (and any beginner programmer knows how to do this, so don't pretend it's difficult), at least put a language selector in a very visible place. This isn't just me, there are countless threads about every Google product asking how to change the language. It took them two years to fix YouTube!