Techcrunch reports that Facebook is a day away from launching a German-language interface, translated in part by 2,000 volunteers. Spanish was launched a few weeks ago. And French is also nearly here.
MySpace is also busy building localized Web sites.
I reviewed both Facebook and MySpace for the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, as part of the newly added Social Networking category. Also included in this category were Orkut, Last.fm, and a company based out of Germany called XING.
XING supports 15 languages, not including English, and an impressive language navigation interface. Which is why XING emerged on top of the Social Networking category. Facebook finished in last place.
But I should stress that Facebook and MySpace are only just getting started. Next year, we could very well see a different leader emerge.
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1 Facebook » Facebook and MySpace Going Multilingual: But… // Mar 3, 2008 at 10:05 pm
[...] Celebrity Gossip & News Blog | Pop Culture Celebrities Exposed | Pop on the Pop wrote an interesting post today on Facebook and MySpace Going Multilingual: But…Here’s a quick excerptTechcrunch reports that Facebook is a day away from launching a German-language interface, translated in part by 2,000 volunteers. [...]
2 Facebook: From 1 to 100 languages in two years | Global by Design // Mar 17, 2009 at 4:14 am
[...] I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers [...]
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