I was talking with one of my sisters last week about Facebook and how big it has become. One of the things I mentioned was that in order for them to really expand would be to offer Facebook in other languages. By opening themselves up to the other hundreds of millions of people on the Internet that don’t speak English, they can continue to grow in exponential leaps and bounds.
Currently Facebook is looking for a localization engineer, which means they are starting to do this. The only question is when they will launch their first localized version.
They will most likely run into some obstacles (technical, social and cultural) when localizing Facebook. A few friends of mine from China said that Facebook’s slim, simple design may not resonate in the East Asian webosphere. Not to mention there are some Facebook clones in Europe (crazy!).
My guess is their first languages will be Spanish, French, German and possibly Chinese.
Should be interesting….