Facebook Begins Launch of New Languages
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 8th, 2008 12:09 AMFacebook has begun the launch of new languages on their site starting with Spanish. This is weeks after they launched their translations application that enabled users to convert the site into Spanish. This model may just end up proving highly effective. Then again I’m sure most readers of this blog are fans of the crowdsourcing strategy. The real question is does this mark the start of Facebook’s world domination?
That last question should come off with a hint of sarcasm but in reality there is still plenty of space left for growth in Spanish countries in addition to Spanish users within the United States. Orkut is famous for having a massive group of Brazilian users but they speak Portuguese not Spanish. Welcome Mexican users as well as users from Spain and South America. There is plenty of growth available just with the Spanish language.
Imagine the growth opportunities available from Chinese, Japanese, French, Korean and every other language. We received word of this early yesterday morning but were unable to duplicate it. Since then, Facebook has added a new drop-down menu that enables users to select their default language (as pictured below). According to a Facebook press release, they will be launching in French in German in the coming weeks. Qué piensa del lanzamiento de nuevos idiomas de Facebook? (Did I get that right?)
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In the meanwhile, diffent social networks have been working hard to get the attention of those users and communities.
An example of it its Sonico.com (http://www.sonico.com) that in less than 6 month from the first release have registered more than 7 million hispanic members and gaining an average of 100k new daily to became the biggest and fastest spanish social network.
But the question here is beyond this topic.
Is this Facebook´s move enough to get new hispanic users?.
I dont think so.
Obviously, this will help and probably a new wave of members will join, but to get the "mass network effect" they will need to work hard and not only relay to "users workforce" to adapt their strategy for this new market. Also, some other core releases and along term commitment is needed in order to adapt the site to the idiosyncrasy of latam and spanish speaking users.
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Your post (and the Facebook launch of their service in Spanish) finally made me write some thoughts in my blog (http://la69puntog.blogspot.com/2008/02/human-ne...) about the importance that overcoming language barriers has for a truly “human network” (as the Cisco company calls it).
As I comment there, I see the opening of websites to other languages as one step that allows different groups of humans to have access to the same service. However, as Juan Pablo suggests above, the challenges of attracting and, even more, making these groups to interact and mix with each other remain.
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