Melissa Chang has written an excellent piece, published yesterday, in the recently relaunched Industry Standard. It looks at how Facebook and MySpace are taking very different approaches to localizing their websites and entering overseas markets. The bottom line: Facebook is winning the popularity contest and shows no signs of slowing down.
MySpace is, perhaps not surprisingly, taking the traditional route; setting up local offices, getting entrenched in the culture and then launching. As part of News Corp — Rupert Murdoch's global media behemoth — this approach may have been imposed on the MySpace unit from above. Or perhaps they simply felt they might as well leverage the enormous influence and resources of News Corp. In either case, they may have overlooked the obvious and will likely pay the price for doing so.
So how is Facebook beating MySpace in their space? With what they know and do best: social networking.
Facebook is building out its foreign language versions with the help of its vast and committed user base. Instead of setting up an office and a staff before launching in new countries, Facebook is putting its audience to work with an online Facebook application that allows translation by the Facebook community.
In other words, Facebook is practicing what they preach and showing the world that it works. There are a number of things that make this a brilliant move on the part of Facebook.
Taking a page out of Google's field-tested playbook, Facebook is keeping translation costs to a minimum by recruting volunteers to do the work of translation for them by way of a highly-intuitive Facebook application developed specifically for this purpose.
But cost savings isn't the only benefit of this approach. It isn't even the top benefit. By getting member volunteers to help with the translation, Facebook is allowing people in countries all over the world to get involved and become directly invested in the translation effort and the resulting local language versions of Facebook. You can bet these members are then going to want to talk with others about what they're doing and show off their handiwork.
By allowing members to suggest languages and then get involved in the translation process, Facebook is able to track demand and prioritize deployment of the many language versions of the site accordingly. They are also rallying a global team of translators that would be prohibitively expensive to hire and manage under a traditional vendor relationship model. This will ultimately allow Facebook to roll out far more language versions far more quickly than if they're were doing all of the translations in house or through a traditional translation vendor.
But surely the quality of the translation can't be on par with that of a professional translation agency. On the contrary; it is likely better than most professional agencies could produce. Wikipedia is a worthwhile example of this kind of community-based quality assurance. Try inserting erroneous information into a popular entry on Wikipedia (though I'd prefer you didn't and simply take my word for it to spare the good Wikipedia elves the trouble). It will typically be corrected within minutes — and sometimes seconds, depending on the vigilance of the volunteer guardians of that particular page.
Facebook handles it slightly differently and in a way that makes much more sense for a site where the user interface is being localized and where phrases likely will not change once they've been translated:
The Translations application by Facebook allows translators all over the world to translate Facebook into different languages. The translation process consists of two steps: submitting translations and voting for translations. You may also discuss the translation process with other translators...
The second step — voting for translations — is the key to quality. Rather than translations being published instantly and corrected later, volunteer translators and reviewers vote on each translation and the highest-rated translation goes live.
The result? Melissa Chang sums it up nicely:
Facebook is currently working on 22 more language translations, and many hundreds of users have left suggestions about other languages that they would like to see translated -- and have volunteered to help with the work.
This savvy approach to new markets will be what wins the international audience for Facebook. In combination with the widely used Facebook Platform, which will allow international developers to build Facebook applications for local audiences, Facebook's international strategy is the better one. MySpace, with its less innovative international approach and still-new and largely untested developer's platform, will not be able to catch up.
I should close by saying that this approach is certainly not right for everyone. It is uniquely appropriate for open source applications and communities, and for social networking environments. That said, I will continue to explore and report on ways that my clients and partners, as well as companies in the news, implement and benefit from community-based localization and quality assurance.
Facebook vs. MySpace: The battle for global social network dominance | The Industry Standard
