I guess, every company that plans to go international, faces the infamous timezone-problem. Not to mention, that just supporting different timezones in your application is just a part of the problem. There is also this fancy thing called daylight saving time.
In a project I used to work in we ended up having a daylight-saving-approximation-table to deduct the presence of daylight saving shift in one or another timezone. Just for your reference: timezones don't have daylight saving shifts, but specific countries do. So what will you do, if you don't know the country?.. We also had a fancy unit test, which would fail twice a year, and only on weekends. You probably know why.
However, this silly note is not about us traveling through different time shifts etc. I wanted to highlight one brilliant example of requirement handling. I don't know, who was first to introduce this, Facebook or Twitter, but they have this amazing timestamp presentation feature. The posts are being timestamped as "just now", "about a minute ago", "about an hour ago", "1 day ago".
This features two amazing mind shifts at once. It makes the timezone-problem obsolete — people just want to know, when the update was posted. They don't want to define their timezone in profile or anything and this is not required from them. This is what makes FB/Twitter adequate to the growing world of mobile. The other mind shift is the loss of precision, which could be considered as a drawback, but actually just keeps things simpler. I don't care if something was posted at 13:51 or 13:52... it happened a few minutes ago.
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