Multi-language Facebook would claim world hegemony in social networking
January 25, 2008
Jennifer Woodard Maderazo digs in to discover why the all-English Facebook plays such a universal game and wins over the native-language social networks in non-English-speaking countries like Turkey, on the MediaShift blog.
It was initially designed for “a very specific audience” – American Ivy leage college students. Now, Facebook has infiltrated not only the American pop culture, but has also gained audiences worldwide, Jennifer writes. Australia and Canada are of no surprise, but there are less Anglo-Saxon countries out there that embraced Facebook as their first choice social network site.
Jenniver points out how language-independent the service gets, and even adjusts dynamically to a culture that is very different from the Western. For example in Turkey, users have developed applications that dub online the cultural traditions of the nation – sending “meze,” a Turkish entrée, from “one table to another.” This universality, adjustability and cleanness of its design generally allow Facebook to beat the existing local options, the author writes.
As a downside, in some countries users experience a social pressure to accept as friends people they wouldn’t necessarily call so just because the society asks for it. Jennifer also points out some other shortcomings that annoy the spam-tired user.
On a coincidental note, Nick O’Neill announced on allfacebook.com the network’s intention to go multi-language. Reportedly, Facebook would use crowdsourcing for translating its content, to defer the costless translation to “third party [application] developers who unlike Facebook will not necessarily have the financial backing to have their [applications] translated,” Craig Bovis writes in a comment on the same blog.
Picture: pbs.org