Inside Facebook

For months, volunteer translators around the world have been using Facebook’s innovative Translations application to translate all 24,000 phrases on Facebook into Spanish, German, and French. Now, Facebook has opened up the Translation application to everyone in order to translate Facebook into every major language on earth.

How does it work?

1. Add the Translations app and choose your language. (Currently, there are translation projects going on in English, Français, Deutsch, Español, Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, Norsk, 日本語, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, 中文(简体), 中文(繁體).)

2. Turn on in-line editing. This will highlight every word on Facebook that needs translating. You can click on each phrase and vote on translations submitted by others or submit a new translation yourself.

3. Browse the translations directory to view and translate more phrases. You can browse and vote on any of the 24,000 phrases. Facebook’s top translators have had thousands of translations accepted!

This is one of the most elegant approaches to localization I’ve seen, making it easy for everyone to contribute, if even only a word or two. Nice job, Facebook Translations team!

Hi5 CEO Ramu Yalamanchi announced today that the Hi5 Platform, built using OpenSocial standards, is set to go live on March 31. Since the first Hi5 Platform apps launched in December, Hi5 has been preparing its Platform to launch with full OpenSocial 0.7 support.

While Facebook and MySpace largely dominant the American and English speaking markets, Hi5 prides itself on the fact that it’s the most trafficked site in over 10 countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and under one third of its userbase are also active on other leading social networks.

In order to help developers reach its predominantly international user base, Hi5 is offering free translation services (into either English or Spanish) and free hosting for the first 100 apps that are approved for the Hi5 Platform.

On a related note, though it has just recently launched translation versions of its own site, Facebook has announced that it will make its crowd-sourced translation tools freely available to developers on the Facebook Platform.

Hi5 is coordinating a “bi-national” hackathon this Saturday at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA, and the Campus Estado de Mexico of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico. Developers interested in learning more can check out the Hi5 Platform here.

In its continuing efforts to build an international audience, Facebook today announced the release of the site translated into German. Starting today, any person who goes to Facebook.com from a German-speaking country will automatically see the site in German. With only 480,000 users, Germany is the 13th largest country on Facebook, according to stats gathered last month.

Soon, Facebook will make its translation tools available to Platform application developers who want to have their applications translated by users.

Facebook in French should be coming next, with other languages coming soon.

Just a day after Facebook launched a Spanish language website, Sasha Rush of Facebook said today that Facebook intends to help application developers internationalize their apps for users in different locale settings by making available some of the same tools Facebook has employed to translate its own site. Said Rush,

In addition to shipping some of strings off to be translated, we used FBML to wrap all of our static text. When a bilingual user comes to the site, she sees untranslated English strings marked with a red link and can translate them inline. Using this approach, users were able to translate the entire site in less than a month.

We choose this method to make it easy for platform applications to internationalize. Soon developers will be able to use the same method that we used internally to work with users to translate their apps.

Clearly, Facebook is signaling to the developer community that helping apps through the extremely difficult process of internationalization is a top priority. (Though of course, there is no way Facebook can solve all the technical challenges associated with building localization support for apps.)

In the bigger picture, it’s clear that Facebook intends to be a global player in social networking. Because its privacy rules significantly limit access and communication between unrelated users, Facebook as a product is well positioned to compete across international and language lines compared to many social networks. As translated versions of Facebook proliferate, we’ll keep a close eye on how Facebook is expanding into new markets.

Taking the first step in its long awaited plans to internationalize, Facebook tonight launched in its second language: Spanish. With over 1,500 users translating over 40,000 sentences in just under four weeks, almost every piece of system text was translated and voted on by the community.

“Over 60 percent of Facebook users are now outside of the U.S., and many live in countries where English is not the primary language,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.  With over 64 million members, that puts over 38 million outside the US.  Here’s a breakdown of where Facebook users live, by country:

Facebook will be launching in French and German next. As the fourth largest country on Facebook, Turkey is getting no love!

Here’s a first look at the Spanish language version of Facebook!

As reported previously, Facebook is launching a major initiative to translate the site into many languages using a “crowd-sourced” approach. Facebook has created a Translation application allows users to translate every word on the Facebook site into a destination language.

In order to get high quality translations, Facebook has created a voting system that allows other translators to evaluate the quality of the translations. All user-entered information (such as status, personal info, and contact info) will remain as entered by users in their native language.

Facebook will be launching internationalized versions in Spanish, German, and French first - likely sometime in March - with more to come after that…

The WSJ reported this week that Ling Ka-shing, the chairman of Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa and the richest man in Asia, has committed another $60M to Facebook’s current $500M round.

The round, which is still open, has now secured $300M in new capital for Facebook (the previous $240M came from Microsoft as part of a larger strategic deal). Apparently, hedge funds are still backing off from the deal because of unfavorable terms.

As Facebook grows internationally, China will become an increasingly important focus for the company. (Facebook is launching internationalized versions of the service soon.) Just a few weeks ago, there were rumors that Facebook would acquire Zhanzuo, the most popular social networking service for college students in China.

FacebookCamp was on last night in Toronto. For those not familiar with the Barcamp or TorCamp, they are adhoc events organized by the community to share information and network. Last night, the focus was on developing for the Facebook platform. The event was combined with the Facebook Developer Garage series with presentations from Caitlin O’Farrell and Meagan Marks from Facebook, and was hosted and sponsored by MaRS Discovery District, Trapeze Media and my own company refresh partners.

FacebookCamp was originally planned as a fairly small gathering for 30-40 developers to discuss the Facebook platform, but the number of registered guests in the Facebook group and Barcamp wiki ballooned to over 600! The actual number of attendees was somewhere around 450.

The presentations for the night broke down as follows:

“The Importance of the Developer Community,” by Caitlin O’Farrell

Caitlin kicked off the Facebook presentations with a quick introduction to the Facebook platform and developer program. Facebook is involving developers in plans for the platform and is running a series of developer events across the US to get feedback from the community.

“Application Best Practices,” by Meagan Marks

Meagan kicked off her presentation with some statistics focusing on Canada, which were well received. 10% of Facebook applications are being developed in Canada, and Canada currently has 3.3M of the 33M registered active users worldwide.

The bulk of Meagan’s presentation focused on best practices for apps to grow. She emphasized that successful applications use all the available channels to interact with users, including the news feed, user profiles, application directory, messages, and invitations.

Meagan also provided good explanation of how to use the different Facebook components: the profile box is best used for publishing and sharing content but is not a good location for the user to create or interact with content, while the canvas page is best place for users to interact with the app (and thus populate the news feed).

She emphasized that making sure that news feed information is relevant and not just spam is vital. Applications that are found to be spamming users will have their news feed items become less likely to be shown. A good technique to make news feed items more relevant is to combine multiple events. For example, if 5 of a user’s friends have just beat his high score, combining these events into a single feed item that lists the different users is a more relevant news feed item for the user’s friends.

Meagan also touched on using different techniques to make your application more viral. For example, creating a virtual currency can help users interact with more aspects of your application. Several “pet” applications give you “dollars” for each of your friend’s pets that you interact with.

Another powerful way to enhance your app would be to create an API to allow other apps to interact with your application. This will leverage the success of other applications.

“Anatomy of a Facebook Application,” by Jay Goldman

Jay covered the basics of creating and setting up an application in the Facebook environment. Most in the crowd were developers, but not everyone had started developing the Facebook environment. Jay covered different app features available for developers and the application registration process to create your Facebook app.

“FBML,” by Sunil Boodram

A good understanding of FBML can make all the difference between a great looking application and something mediocre. Sunil covered all the basic functions of the FBML and the test console that Facebook has made available to debug your FBML templates. Most of the questions at the end of the presentation focused on using iFrames with FBML which I thought was rather unexpected. My own experience with both has been that you generally use one or the other and if you’re commiting to a iFrame design you use minimal FBML code.

“FQL,” by Craig Saila

FQL is probably one of the least documented components of the Facebook platform, and it was great to see an in depth review of its capabilities. While Craig is not a DBA, he did a compare FQL with some of the more popular SQL products. One thing to consider is that FQL does not have the ability to limit the data returned so your application almost always has to parse large data sets. This means that your data parsing routines need to be efficient, or your application may suffer from poor performance.

“Updating the Profile Box,” by Colin Smillie (me)

I covered the basics of updating the profile box and some of the limitations that you need to work around. After doing a few searches of the Facebook developer forums, this seemed to be an area where many developers are having trouble. Understanding that iframes are not allowed, that Flash and Silverlight will not auto-run, and that the profile content is cached can all cause problems. I don’t think I described the profile authentication requirements and the need for an infinite session very well, but there is a lot of documentation online about these requirements.

After the presentations, the night ended with 3 application demos. Similar to Democamp presentations, the emphasis was on live code and short demos.

.Net Sample Application, by Ricardo Covo

Ricardo’s demo application wouldn’t load properly over the MaRS network, but luckily he did have some slides to cover his presentation. I’m not that familiar with .NET development, but the availability of .NET wrappers for the Facebook platform seem to make it much easier to develop. For example, most of the problems with Facebook profile updates and authentication are all abstracted in the .NET libraries and are automatically handled for the developer.

Carpool Application, by Rajat Suri

The Carpool application provides the ability to locate people driving between your location and another. You can request a ride or post that you are making a trip. The application seems to be most popular between Waterloo and Toronto, and so far has not done a lot of promotion. The application is tracking the carbon emissions saved through the Carpool application and has been a big success so far.

My Aquarium, by Greg Thomson

Greg’s demo was probably one of the most informative of the night - not really because his application was that outstanding, but because his discussion of the problems he’s solved while developing his apps for the Facebook platform. The nature of his application requires that he do a lot of graphic rendering, so he’s distributing the load across multiple Linux servers and storing data using the Amazon S3 service. He also noticed that approximately 5% of his FBML updates fail as a result of Facebook timeouts, so he’s set up a process to continually go back and complete the updates. And lastly, he noted that Facebook is continually evolving the application platform, so he said he’s always staying on top of platform changes and updates.

Overall, FacebookCampToronto was a great night, and I’m really glad everything went smoothly. I’d really like to thank Facebook for their involvement, all the sponsors, and the volunteers that helped organize the event. We’re already planning the next event for Fall 2007 with a greater focus on the business and marketing aspects of the Facebook platform.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebookcamp, toronto, platform

By now, Facebook’s penetration of American Internet life is well known…

• 90% of US college students have Facebook accounts, and half of them login every day.
• Professionals are increasingly migrating their professional networks from LinkedIn to Facebook.
• Facebook is increasingly replacing email as the default communications platform for informal messages between students and non-urgent messages between professionals.

However, less attention has been paid to Facebook’s growing international presence. While other social networks have dominant leadership positions across Europe, Australia, and Asia, Facebook’s penetration is on the rise — at least in the English speaking world…

• 11.4 million, or 33% of the Canadian population, has joined Facebook as of June 2007, making up over 10% of the total Facebook population.
• In Britain, London has become the largest geographic network (surpassing Toronto), now with over 880,000 users, representing about 10% of the city’s population.
• Facebook’s Australian population grew by 80% in June alone, while MySpace Australia grew 10%.

However, one glaring omission is inhibiting Facebook’s growth elsewhere: it’s only available in English. Only 50,000 Germans use Facebook (about 0.06% of a country of 80 million), and Asian numbers are nowhere to be seen. As a result, dozens of regionally-tailored knock-offs have sprung up in countries like China and Turkey in an attempt to beat Facebook to the punch.

But Facebook will be launching their first major localization initiative soon:

Zuckerberg: We haven’t translated the site yet, but that’s something we’re working on and it should be done soon. What we’re doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.

Facebook will likely make their first push across western Europe (perhaps releasing Facebook translations in German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese), though the cultural divide that Zuckerberg alludes to is much bigger across the Pacific. More specifics soon.

Technorati Tags: facebook, international, local, language