Want to help Facebook translate their site into over 20 languages? Now you can! While it’s not in every language (still missing Hebrew and perhaps a few others), the applications is now available to the general public. Previously the application was invite only. Some have suggested that this mean an imminent launch in multiple other languages. While the time frame is unknown, Facebook has been successful at launching in French, German and Spanish all in the first quarter.

Perhaps Facebook is aiming to have the site completely translated in every application by the end of the second quarter. There are over 15,000 phrases that need to be translated. In the languages that have been approved, there have been between 2,800 and 4,300 translators for each language. Facebook has now released the application for everybody after successfully testing out in their first three languages.

This is an exciting time for Facebook as their growth has continued and they are now expanding internationally. According to many charts, Facebook has now overtaken MySpace domestically, now they just have the rest of the world to conquer! If you are interested in translating Facebook into other languages, check out the Facebook translations application.

As I mentioned last week, two platforms will be going live this week. This morning hi5 went live and with it the opportunity to gain rapid traction for your applications. There are absolutely no limits on application invites currently sparking yet another gold rush for application developers. The only difference this time is that OpenSocial is the standard for development making it a little more challenging to rapidly push out a new application.

Read more on the Social Times

Imagine spending a couple months building a Facebook application only to wake up one day and see it launched as part of Facebook’s core feature set. That’s what happened to Amin Ariana who built the Friendmates application. Amin launched a friend suggestion and soon enough it was launched on Facebook. While I think this service is an obvious feature that would eventually launch, Amin did not sound to happy in his email to News.com.

This wasn’t the only time that Facebook has stepped on developers’ toes. With the upcoming launch of the Facebook chat application, many developers will find it a challenge for their application to succeed. There are currently over 1,200 chat application listed in the Facebook application directory. While most of the chat applications have failed at attracting a sizable user base, a few creative ones have grown significantly.

Babuki Desktop Instant Messenger is one application that has been able to attract a substantial user base within a matter of days. They are avoiding competition with Facebook by launching a desktop chat application that integrates with Facebook. This contrasts with Facebook’s upcoming chat application which resides completely within Facebook.

For now Facebook has avoided angering too many application developers but as time passes and Facebook rolls out new features they are continuously at risk of backlash. Have you seen other applications suffer from new Facebook features?

FriendFeed has been stealing a lot of attention away from Facebook recently. Facebook easily steal back much of that attention in a relatively short amount of time. They could literally duplicate FriendFeed’s feature set and generate an unfiltered version of their existing newsfeed. Ultimately the newsfeed is theoretically open already since you can post news items via the platform API. With a little bit of hacking you could post your external news items to Facebook.

The rumor is already out that Facebook is opening up their newsfeed soon. Hopefully it isn’t too little too late. Then again, the majority of people are not actually paying attention to FriendFeed. It’s only the early tech adopters currently. There is a bigger problem with all of this social content though as Loic Le Meur pointed out yesterday. All of these solutions currently happen on other websites and not on my own.

In theory it would be great if we could manage all of the content from our own site and point to each others’ websites or profiles. Right now we have distributed profiles resulting in our information being spread across multiple sites. I’d argue that we will see the death of the profile from most sites and simply a link back to a single site. Perhaps that site will be Facebook or alternatively it will eventually be our own website.

While it will take a long time for the social web to figure itself out (if it ever does) Facebook is going to need to reclaim their leadership position in opening up the social web. Perhaps we will see a big announcement at the upcoming F8 event in San Francisco.

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, a British judge has “made official what many of us have long suspected – that being ‘Facebook friends’ with someone doesn’t necessarily make you their friend.” Apparently a woman accused her ex-boyfriend of harassing her by sending her a friend request on Facebook. I’m not quite sure how that qualifies as harassment. Apparently the judge agreed.

The boyfriend’s argument was that “the contact was highly innocuous because being ‘Facebook friends’ could not be defined as ‘friendship in the traditional sense’”. I currently have a ton of friend requests and most of them are not from actual friends. I frequently approve people as friends that I don’t know and don’t expect much out of that relationship. So if you are a friend collector and have added me as a friend, no worries, I’m not expecting anything from you

Dr. Dick, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW (not sure where it is), said that “removing someone from your friend list is almost a declaration of war.” Just as I don’t count my eggs before they hatch, I don’t count my friends on Facebook but I’m sure there are people that do. As such, don’t be surprised if you get an angry stalker when they realize you are no longer their friend.

Do you usually connect with real friends or do you have fake friends on Facebook?

Yesterday I wrote about how Facebook has begun suggesting your friends. One additional feature of this new system is when new friends register that may be connected to you, you receive an email notifying you that they have joined. This is a genius move by Facebook. One of the largest challenges in building a large social platform is people that register and never come back. This new system significantly increases the likelihood of return users.

Just yesterday I suggested that future media companies are going to need community managers to ensure that the community remains active and to build the community. This new feature by Facebook automates much of that process and ensures that most members won’t feel left out since it will automatically alert members to the new user’s registration.

I can’t speak for Facebook as to how significantly this new feature will reduce the creation of unused accounts but I’m sure it will have a significant impact. Unfortunately for most social networks, it is much more challenging to leverage this type of feature. Automatic friend referral requires a critical user base. In the short run, community managers are your best bet.

Chris Soghoian has an interesting article about how a number of application developers are failing to protect against extremely basic security risks. For instance, a user can monitor all post and get requests (a system for passing data from a form which prompts users for information) coming from an application form and modify it prior to submitting the data to the application server.

The result is that hackers could theoretically spoof their identity. This is an issue that most websites are also vulnerable to. Not only are these applications vulnerable to potential spoofing attacks but occasionally they are at risk of typical SQL injection attacks. The experienced developer will build these protections into their scripts.

Given that many of these applications aren’t built by experienced developers though, there is an increasing risk that sensitive data gets manipulated. Personally, I think there are enough protections in place on Facebook’s end but the Surveillance State team is trying to paint a different picture.

I’m sure we will occasionally see an application get exploited but for the most part, Facebook has done a pretty good job in protecting against security risks.

Yesterday I read a press release about a new American Airlines application. As usual the release provided no link to the physical application but after searching I was able to find what I was looking for. The new Travel Bag application, provides users with a forum for talking about their travel experiences. It’s pretty much a travel journal for travelers. I can understand the ease of use of uploading Facebook photos via my mobile device but logging in to this application to describe where I’ve been traveling seems a little bit tedious.

Additionally, this application has absolutely no engaging content for me to interact with. If I’m not currently traveling I have absolutely no use for this application. Get this, I can’t even view my friends’ travel logs within the application! I hate to really criticize an application but when you figure American Airlines probably spent $30k building this application, you would hope that they had produced something highly useful.

One commenter on the application’s wall summed it up well:

I’m glad to hear that AA is getting such great reviews. That’s really great. However, I believe that AA would be an even better company if it went bankrupt. From really bad customer service to the computers that are unable to go back and look at previous reservation data, I would recommend this airline to anyone who is looking for a waste of time and money.

I don’t think this commenter spoke for all the users because one or two (possibly seeded) commenters appeared to actually enjoy the application. It’s great to see travel companies making an effort to enter the social networking space but next time they may want to focus on actually making the application social.

If keeping a travel journal sounds like something that would appeal to you on Facebook then go check out the Travel Bag application.

A couple days ago, Mike Arrington posted about a potential preferred developers program. There had been rumors of this floating around for a while but at last night’s Facebook developers garage in Boulder, Dave Morin said that there is no preferred program coming out anytime soon. He said that the idea had been floated around but no action has been taken.

The concept of having preferred developers is an interesting concept. Theoretically though, the Facebook platform should be automatically rewarding “good” applications and punishing “bad” or spammy applications. The only problem with this model is that there needs to be some sort of human interaction to determine what are “good” applications. For instance how are buckets determined?

Supposedly it is based on an algorithm but the reality is that people have seen varied adjustments in their daily invite allotment and it’s not based on their own adjustments necessarily. So what does the future hold for a Facebook preferred developer? Well in addition to VIP access to the clubs in Silicon Valley, I would imagine that the VIP developer would get more invites for their applications similar to the level that the CBS Sports March Madness application previously received.

While there is no word of an impeding preferred program, I could see this happening in the future. What do you think would be an effective way for getting applications out in front of the noise? Do you think a VIP program makes sense?

I’m watching the Boulder Facebook Developer Garage live right now. If you are interested, check it out below. Thanks to Kevin Cawley for posting it.