A direct translation of Facebook in Spanish.
The social network launched its Español pages today. There are over 2.8 million Spanish speaking people on Facebook from Spain and Latin America making it the second most popular language. Facebook took a different approach from MySpace, who developed international sites and opened offices throughout various regions; Facebookers were asked to translate the content - over 1,500 FBers were recruited.
The Spanish pages will be populated if your IP address is “Latin” or you can choose the option in “My Account”, “Language” to change your primary language.
I wonder if Marcos Azucarcolina (Mark Zuckerberg) chose the right strategy in localizing or globalizing for that matter…I also hope the pages were not direct translations - as I did in this post 
David A - what are your thoughts on this?
February 8th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Facebook took a long time to finish this important task to open their platform massively to spanish-speaking users.
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 become 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.
February 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Great example of crowdsourcing by FB.
German and French are up next with the addition of new European ad markets pinned down by their London office.
I’m VERY interested to see how FB plays out over Orkut in LatAm.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
There is no doubt about how fast is growing Facebook on Latin America. However, the same problems that FB has on the international “expert” community, like the avalanche of APIs, and the real effect of the Advertising, is taking part of the ussual comments from the users, on their face to face conversations. So, I guess the challenge for FB is not only the battle for new languages and continents, but to deal with the spread of these effects.
Regards!
JP
PD: Congratulations for your new blog theme
February 17th, 2008 at 8:22 am
[...] - Social networked focused on LATAM - Over 8 million users - Ranks 167 on Alexa - Recently launched Portuguese version - Tremendous growth in last six months You may recall our recent Facebook post (about its Spanish version) - see the comments posted by Juan Pablo. [...]