For most of its history, Facebook has tried to build a single product that works for everyone in the world. The only localization it offered was the text on the site, and even that was a one-size-fits-all product — its Translation tool allowed it to quickly launch in new languages using feedback from users.

But now, we’re seeing more signs of Facebook trying to customize its products for specific locations, at least for a few major markets where it wants to grow. Some of the latest examples are a new game-style Facebook site tour for new Japanese users,  and a small engineering expansion in South Korea. We’ll look at these and more, below.

Certain Countries Get Special Attention

The stage has already been set for product localization. Company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in October that four countries had become targets for new growth over the past year: South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. Aside from all being located at least partly in Asia, these four countries are also notable because they all have well-established local social networking competitors: Vkontakte in Russia, Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan and Tencent among others in China. More generally, all of these countries have unique languages, cultures, and in some cases government regulations that have historically hindered outside competitors.

Out of those four, Facebook is blocked in China — the company has hinted that it might work with the government in order to be allowed in, but that hasn’t happened yet. So here’s a look at what’s happening with Facebook in the other three locations. All data is from our Global Monitor report, part of our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service. Note for subscribers: We’ll be coming out with a detailed new monthly report analyzing worldwide Facebook traffic and trends, with the first one arriving in early December.

Japan

Facebook’s first foreign engineering office opened in Tokyo, Japan, this past year. So far, it has introduced products like a customized interface for mobile users, and an in-house app designed to help users with job searches. That app, the first Facebook has made for a local market, is most interesting for its cultural focus — it is intended as a way for users to make connections in the traditionally rigid Japanese job market.

It also introduced a way to syndicate Facebook content to Mixi accounts.

The most recent example of Japanese localization is from a couple weeks ago, when Facebook added a new site tour that prompts users to take a set of four “missions.” The missions are just a series of screenshots and text explaining how people can fill out their profiles, and include tips aimed at Japanese users (like talking about the value of using real-world names). This sort of site tour page doesn’t currently exist in other languages that we know of, which is reflected in the Japanese page’s generic Facebook URL.

Japan’s growth began picking up around the middle of 2009, after the first translated version of the site became available. Since then, it has lagged much of the rest of Asia and the world. But it’s continued to steadily climb, and had its highest numbers yet in October, with 1.69 million monthly active users and 262,000 new ones.

South Korea

Facebook isn’t saying much about what it’s doing in the country. The two previous postings about contract sales engineering positions are no longer on the Careers page, but there’s a new posting for a full-time sales engineering position. Besides the job listings, the most prominent thing the company has done was launch a dedicated page about the country.

We’ve heard it could be expanding its local engineering operations beyond sales, but a spokesperson’s response seems to shoot that down. “We are currently only hiring for jobs that are posted on the Careers page, and don’t have much more to say on rumors and speculation.” The expansion, in whatever form it might be taking, has not yet resulted in any Korea-focused Facebook products.

Yet, after a first year or so of slow growth, the country’s Facebook base has quadrupled since April, passing Japan to reach 267,000 new users and 1.73 million total MAU by October. Facebook, as Zuckerberg suggested, has even bigger ambitions.

Russia

The last difficult-but-winnable country on the list is Russia, where the social network faces a number of homegrown rivals. Facebook shares an investor, Digital Sky Technologies, with a few of these including Vkontakte. So far, the company has done a couple 0.facebook.com mobile integration deals so mobile users with some local carriers can get free access to the site, for example. But the ’0′ deals aren’t particularly special, since the company has done dozens of those deals around the world.

Facebook started making Russia-specific moves a few weeks ago, when leading Russian search engine company Yandex began tightly integrating Facebook content in a special deal similar to what Facebook is doing with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (but not with Google).

Russia, like the previous two countries, is seeing a distinct growth surge. It grew by 548,000 last month to reach 2.132 million MAU — a striking increase given its slower history, and local competition.

What the Future Holds

These examples are new and mostly basic, but we expect the localization efforts to increase as Facebook looks to strengthen its market position around the world. Beyond more guides and other content, it will likely try to use its products to benefit key local partners , as with the case with Yandex, or to help solve relevant market problems, as is the case with the Japan job search app.

Stay tuned for more detailed coverage of Facebook around the world in our Inside Facebook Gold data and analysis service.

App developer Betapond has created the Top 50 UK Places Page tab application for the Page of UK tourism promotion agency VisitBritain. The tab app ranks tourist attractions such as The London Eye and Buckingham Palace by their total check-ins to date. Users can see if their friends have visited the Places, find information about the attractions, and purchase tickets through VisitBritain’s website. The app shows how aggregated public Places data can be used to make money for travel companies by highlighting locations.

To date, check-in leaderboards by Betapond and Context Optional have been for single brands looking to drive foot traffic to their own locations. By using Places data to enrich a travel portal which sells tickets to attractions by a variety of owners, those who don’t actually own any Places can profit off of Facebook’s location product.

Top 50 UK Places is the default landing tab on VisitBritain’s Love UK Page. Users first see the name, profile picture, and total check-ins to the top 10 Places. Each entry includes links to the VisitBritian website to find out more information or buy tickets, and buttons to share the tab app on Facebook or Like that attraction’s Places page. Free, public attractions show a “Free” badge instead of a ticket link. If users give the app permission, it can show friends who’ve checked into the Places.

The rankings display well known historical attractions, but also Places which see a disproportionate number of check-ins to their total foot traffic, such as sports arenas and amusement parks. For this reason, the app can be useful for finding out where locals go for fun, not just spots tourists find in guidebooks.

Betapond says it will be releasing additional projects with VisitBritain in the coming months in hopes of creating a “‘global guest book’ for international tourists to share their experiences.” If the app gains traction and makes money for VisitBritain, expect travel companies and tourism agencies around the world to install similar apps.

Facebook has implemented a new application testing system which allow developers to easily create tester user accounts. The fake accounts can be generated and friend each other through the Open Graph, but can’t interact with real users or public content such as Pages. They won’t ever be disabled by Facebook’s spam or fake account detection systems. This should remove the need for developers to manually create and manage fake accounts which are in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.

Previously, developers had to designate real accounts as Platform Application Test Accounts, but these accounts couldn’t test sandbox applications, and could never be returned to normal user status. The new system allows for sandbox as well as live application testing, and creates new accounts instead of converting existing accounts. 50 test users can be created for each application, and can be accessed by any developer associated with the app.

The new Test Users system comes with a set of API calls which use the access token of the application being tested. Along with creating test users and forging friendship connections between them, each user can be given a different set of extended permissions, make API calls, and be deleted once no longer needed. However, test users “cannot edit any technical settings or access insights” of the application they are testing.

Currently, test users can only be controlled via the API, though Facebook says developers will eventually be able to control them through the Developer application. The new Test User system should come as a relief to devs who were wasting time manually controlling test users and creating new ones when Facebook discovered and disabled their fake accounts.

Another interesting mix of Pages on our list this week. There was everything from big brands like Coca-Cola and Converse to movies and TV shows to musicians and the ever-present Megan Fox. To make our list this week Pages needed to grow between 861,000 and 1.4 million Likes; we gather our information from our PageData service, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	YouTube	20,938,174	+1,410,244	+7.22
2.	Harry Potter	7,522,965	+1,405,441	+22.97
3.	Facebook	26,530,514	+1,405,136	+5.59
4.	Disney	11,540,759	+1,389,216	+13.68
5.	Rihanna	15,143,636	+1,306,980	+9.45
6.	Coca-Cola	17,836,804	+1,253,654	+7.56
7.	Eminem	20,433,081	+1,240,122	+6.46
8.	The Simpsons	13,454,222	+1,190,905	+9.71
9.	Jackass	5,309,271	+1,175,744	+28.44
10.	MTV	9,707,803	+1,155,890	+13.52
11.	Converse All Star	9,895,071	+1,130,282	+12.90
12.	Shakira	13,505,259	+1,079,925	+8.69
13.	Converse	8,110,157	+1,003,035	+14.11
14.	Usher	8,063,496	+974,380	+13.74
15.	DORY	5,851,902	+969,260	+19.85
16.	Toy Story	9,055,566	+936,843	+11.54
17.	SpongeBob SquarePants	12,156,188	+916,971	+8.16
18.	Bob Marley	14,977,162	+903,135	+6.42
19.	Oreo	13,960,195	+866,168	+6.61
20.	Megan Fox	17,584,050	+860,844	+5.15

Global brands made up a big chunk of our list.

YouTube was first on the list after adding 1.4 million Likes this week to come in just under 21 million. Facebook’s Page was third after adding 1.4 million Likes, climbing to 26.5 million; probably some growth was attributable to news of their new data center in North Carolina and a new messaging service.

Coca-Cola was sixth, adding 1.2 million Likes to pass 17.8 million. Converse All Star’s Page was at 11, with 1.1 million new Likes and a total of 9.8 million. A sister Page, Converse, added 1 million Likes to reach 8.1 million; both Converse Pages have been promoting a contest for musicians. Finally, Oreo was at number 19 with 866,200 Likes to bring the Page to almost 14 million Likes: the Page benefitted from a promotion from another Page, Baskin-Robbins, which was giving away a coupon for Oreo products.

There were a lot of media-related Pages on our list this week, too.

First, Disney’s presence on our Top 20 list has become more noticeable in the recent past. Not only did Disney’s main Page make our list at number four after adding about 1.4 million Likes to tally 11.5 million this week, but, two other Disney-affiliated Pages made the list. Dory, a character from “Finding Nemo,” made the list this week after adding 969,300 Likes to grow to 5.8 million; this seems pretty high for an old movie, so perhaps there was some Page consolidation going on, although there was cross-promotion with the Disney Pixar Page recently, too. Then, the “Toy Story” Page added 936,800 Likes to pass 9 million. Although the third installment of the series was released on DVD and Blu-ray recently, this is also a very high growth pattern, so there could have been something else going on.

Other media Pages this week included movies and TV shows — and Megan Fox.

The “Harry Potter” Page came in second on our list this week after adding 1.4 million Likes to reach 7.5 million. The movie premiere will be later this week and the Page has been doing promotion with trailers, news and contests. At number 8 was “The Simpsons” TV show, which added 1.1 million Likes to grow to a total of 13.4 million; the show was also renewed for another season, nominated for awards and was promoting merchandise. Next, at number 9, was the “Jackass” movie franchise, which has been promoting the movie premiere in Europe, consequently adding 1.1 million Likes to its 5.3 million-strong Page.

MTV’s Page was at number 10 with 1.1 million new Likes, a total of 9.7, and a bunch of promotion of its programming. Number 17 was the “SpongeBob SquarePants” Page, which added about 917,000 Likes after promoting the show’s first mystery special. Finally, Megan Fox made it to number 20 on our list, adding 860,900 Likes to grow to 17.5 million by doing nothing other than begin sexy.

And music, as usual, was also big on the list.

Rihanna’s Page was fifth after the release of her latest album, accompanying promotion and an ongoing photo contest for fans. The Page added 1.3 million fans to pass 15.1 million. Then Eminem came in seventh with 1.2 million new fans, passing 20.4 million, and posting some awards nominations. Shakira’s Page was at number 12 with 1 million new fans, 13.5 million Likes, and lots of activity around her new album/tour. Usher’s Page added 974,400 Likes to pass 8 million as he started his new tour; the Page took fourteenth place. Finally, at number 18, was the Bob Marley Page, which added 903,100 Likes to come in just under 15 million.

Editor’s note: A few PageData entries (like this one) appear to be double-counting total Likes on some days and not counting any Likes on others. We’ll provide more information as we figure out the problem.

After using Facebook’s overhauled Messages for a few days, we agree that is isn’t — as the company stresses — an email replacement. But it will help the social network absorb informal, social communication that would once have been relegated to the traditional email inbox.

On the surface, Facebook’s Messages appears to be a modest touchup. The revamp cleans out the noise from Groups and Events, shows a user’s entire conversation history and makes users reachable anywhere and on every device. It doesn’t have the newfangled, complex interface of Wave, Google’s failed take on the future of communication, and it doesn’t have IMAP or POP support, which would let users sync their Facebook Messages with other systems.

It’s simple, because the design constraint Facebook now confronts every time it launches a product is that it has to be palatable to mainstream, late adopters. So the company’s latest string of launches have been notable more for their potential to scale instead of their imaginative design.

That said, the new Messages was actually created with the text and chat-heavy habits of teenagers in mind, positioning the company to stay relevant to the next generation of information consumers. Users in their 20s, 30s and older may not give up Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but perhaps teens will develop a habit of giving out their @facebook.com addresses. The social network already facilitates 4 billion private messages a day and has 350 million active users on its Messages product.

“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” founder Mark Zuckerberg said, adding that the teenagers he interviewed complained that e-mail was too slow. Users had to enter a topic into the subject line and the person to whom it was addressed.

“It really adds a lot of friction and cognitive load to the process of sending e-mail,” he said. From this research, Zuckerberg and other Facebook engineers realized they needed to build a lightweight, constantly-present communications tool that would interface with older tools like e-mail.

He said that a modern system needed to have seven characteristics. It needed to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short.

Here are a couple, long-term changes we could see happening with the new Messages:

• Informal, social communication may migrate to Facebook away from email. Any type of messaging where Facebook was one of several options to reach a friend may consolidate on the social network. More formal types of communication — with work, or with your bank — will stay with email. Over time, this division could make email less attractive as more core, social communication moves to Facebook.
• The SMS integration seems to be working well, without sending too many unnecessary expensive texts. In the past two to three days, I’ve only received one text despite receiving several messages a day. As Josh Constine pointed out in an earlier post, Facebook processes several signals to determine which medium to route it to. If the recipient is actively online on Facebook they’ll receive the Message as a Chat. If the Message is a reply to an email, it will be sent to email. Users can check a box next to the reply field to purposefully send a text message.
• Messages could fuel more friend requests as Facebook’s inbox becomes a more important gateway to communicating with people.
• There aren’t any apparent opportunities for developers to use the Inbox as an additional channel to reach users. They will still have to reply on the Games dashboard, cross-promotion and advertising.
• As we wrote in an earlier post, Messages will give Facebook extra data about a user’s strong ties. At its inception, Facebook was a tightly-knit, college network. But as it opened up to the public from 2006 onward, it became more about acquiring and strengthening weak ties instead of reinforcing existing close friendships. This came to a head at the end of last year, when Facebook made a series of changing defaulting more user information to be public. In the last half of 2010, the company has shifted back, launching a number of products like Groups and Places that are more about supporting closed, or real-world interaction. Messages adds another layer to this. The people a user messages privately may be closer than people they occasionally comment on.

We recently launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at PlaySpan, Focused Labs, Playfish, Glu Mobile, Perfect World, Arkadium, Meteor Games, and Playdom.

• Director of Global Support (Merchant & Customer Support) (Santa Clara, CA)
• Technical Integration Manager (Santa Clara, CA)
• Engagement Manager, Professional Services (Santa Clara, CA)
• Inside Sales Representative (Santa Clara, CA)

• Backend Software Developer (Santa Monica, CA)

• Head of Integrated Marketing (San Francisco, CA)

• VP of External Development (San Francisco, CA)

• QA/Release Engineer (Foster City, CA)

• Social Game Designer (New York, NY)
  

• Director, Product Management (Beverly Hills, CA)
  
• 2d Artist w/ Flash Experience (Beverly Hills, CA)

• Lead Software Engineer – Playdom (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Software Engineer – Flash (Playdom) (San Francisco, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Facebook has changed the dimensions of flash players embedded in the news feed from 460 by 460 pixels to 398 by 398 pixels. Facebook initially labeled the change a bug that would be fixed, but later made the change official. The new dimensions may cause some flash to be displayed improperly, so developers should check to ensure their flash attachments look right.

The dimension change was not on the developer roadmap (that we are aware of), and so may have caught many developers by surprise. Facebook recently implemented a new monthly migration system for allowing developers to integrate new features and bug fixes to the platform at the their own pace. The system was designed to make it easier for developers to handle these types of changes, but only works if the changes are in the roadmap.

The bug which initially caused the size change was reported on November 3rd. It retroactively changed the size of all flash players embedded in the news feed from 460 pixels to 398. The next day, Facebook engineer Mike Vernal confirmed on the bug report’s comment reel that developers should “operate under the assumption that that is a bug that we will be fixing shortly.” Four days later, though, the bug was not fixed and Facebook staffer Jeff Bowen asked developers for examples of malfunctioning flash players. Then two days later, Douglas Purdy, Facebook’s new Director of Developer Relations reversed Facebook’s position, explaining that “moving forward the size will be 398×398, but that size is subject to change (and your content will be scaled accordingly).”

The changed appeared at the same time that Facebook altered the format of stories in the news feed by reducing the text size and showing status updates or context for rich shares below a user’s name instead of on the same line. It is possible that Facebook was testing the new format which caused the bug, and when it decided to implement the new format the bug was simply accepted and labeled “WONTFIX.”

The back and forth on the decision further angered some developers, especially those with embeds including non-vector graphics which don’t scale properly. Facebook has worked hard to communicate platform changes lately, but that didn’t happen here.

This week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by daily active users helps to surface a few new apps, as well as show that older concepts still have traction. Here’s the top 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Windows Live Messenger	9,572,993	+457,539	+5%
2.	Social Fun	477,874	+328,357	+220%
3.	Hollywood City	375,059	+225,676	+151%
4.	恐龍王國	431,378	+209,998	+95%
5.	Ravenwood Fair	423,210	+207,078	+96%
6.	Tag Friends	184,934	+179,919	+3,588%
7.	BandPage by RootMusic	589,216	+170,550	+41%
8.	Horoscopes	2,545,257	+168,790	+7%
9.	Pet Society	2,221,119	+157,005	+8%
10.	Vegas City	199,744	+153,269	+330%
11.	عيد على صحابك	129,874	+127,710	+5,902%
12.	Graffiti	356,763	+120,227	+51%
13.	Island God	148,867	+119,806	+412%
14.	SmileyCentral	186,275	+109,378	+142%
15.	Tư vấn vui	104,289	+98,524	+1,709%
16.	Facebook Live	108,402	+98,167	+959%
17.	It Girl	737,510	+93,367	+14%
18.	Backyard Monsters	739,846	+89,619	+14%
19.	Millionaire City	2,718,297	+87,943	+3%
20.	Bubble Island	1,069,382	+86,319	+9%

Following Windows Live Messenger, the growth of which seems to finally be slowing somewhat, Social Fun is the latest friend quiz, asking users question about their friends in Spanish. Most English-language friend quizzes have now been suspended or otherwise discouraged by Facebook, but we do regularly see foreign-language versions popping up.

Hollywood City is one of the latest games from Digital Chocolate, which holds no fewer than four spots on the list, including Vegas City, Island God and Millionaire City. With the exception of Island God, all are city-builders. Digital Chocolate itself is nearing four million DAU, a not-inconsiderable amount.

Graffiti is one we haven’t seen in a while, but the drawing app is a perennial favorite. About a month ago, it released a full-screen draw feature with Bing sponsorship, which significantly eases use of the app.

Finally, Tư vấn vui is worth pointing out, simply because it’s in Vietnamese. Although not official policy, Vietnam’s government has more or less blocked Facebook for months. But as we recently discussed here, Facebook is growing in Vietnam anyway, and has aspirations of eventually securing a permanent foothold. In the meantime, Vietnamese users seem eager to access the social network.

Facebook has acquired stealth startup Walletin and hired its founders Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers. Ondrejka was the first chief technology officer of Linden Lab, developers of Second Life. Unlike the social network’s recent purchases of Divvyshot, ShareGrove, and Hot Potato which were explicitly talent acquisitions, Facebook has stated that it “reached an agreement to acquire the assets of Walletin”, meaning the secret product the duo was working on could be integrated into Facebook.

In a post to his personal blog, Ondrejka explains the circumstance in which they accepted Facebook’s undisclosed offer:

“When we met with Facebook…we met our people. Engineers focused on getting sh*t done. Moreover they recognized the disruption we were betting on and saw how far we could run with it at Facebook. And they moved like they were still a startup…the more we learned about Facebook, the more we saw our ideas fitting in.”

The story highlights an emerging trend of Facebook using its engineers as recruiters to attract top established talent from startups as well as students from prestigious engineering schools. Instead of relying on promises of flashy perks like personal assistants, or high acquisition payouts, Facebook touts the benefits of working on a project with global impact without the stifling bureaucracy common at larger tech companies. This is a value proposition which magnifies over time as more great engineers join the company.

The key to Facebook’s long term future success will be maintaining the quality of its team as it rapidly grows. To do this, it will need its internal communication team to keep the company seeming personal and cohesive, and managers who can prevent busywork from reaching engineers. Keeping its own engineering team happy could prove Facebook’s greatest recruiting tool.

The retail roll-out of Facebook Credits gift cards is continuing today, with the company announcing their availability in three more chains: Safeway, GameStop and RadioShack. The timing suggests that Facebook wants these cards all over the place before the holiday season gets underway, and people start looking for gifts that their social game-obsessed friends and relatives will appreciate.

For those not familiar, the cards allow you to buy Credits in $15, $25 and $50 increments. Scratch off the back of the card to get a unique secret code, then enter it in the card section of the main Credits purchase interface on the site, and your account will gain the amount the card is worth.

Following the efforts of social gaming companies, and other digital entertainment providers before them, Facebook began introducing the cards in early September of this year – Target was the first retailer to get the currency, Best Buy and Walmart followed late last month. You can find the nearest stores carrying Credits here.

Beyond serving as gifts, the cards also allow people without access to credit cards or other online payment options (especially teens) instead buy Credits using cash. The point is to help increase the volume of Credits on the platform — a larger effort the company has had going for months.

Until the past year, developers with canvas Facebook applications deployed their own currencies. Facebook has slowly been requiring all of them to transition to Credits, though, and at this point most large and mid-sized developers have moved over or are in the process of doing so. While the company takes a 30% cut of Credits revenue, it thinks that between its brand, the integration of Credits within the core site features, the increasing number of payment options (like the gift cards) can together combine to make the currency more lucrative for developers.