Facebook goes live in France : 1.4 million users in France can now connect in French
March 11, 2008
The brand new French version of Facebook, one of the most popular social media sites in the internet, went live Sunday night. As with Facebook’s recent forays into Spain and Germany, Facebook used locals in France to help it create its French language version.
Around 4,000 internet-savvy users in France were tapped to translate English terms such as “super-poke” into the French lexicon before the launch of Facebook in France. Members in France can now choose to display the framework of the site in any one of four languages: English, French, Spanish or German — although many applications, games and software still display exclusively in English.
People in France could always join Facebook, of course. Now, however, there is a French-language version, which means Facebook’s penetration in France will probably grow exponentially. However, even now, France already occupies 6th place in terms of total number of users on Facebook, while Canada, with its own large French-speaking population, is in third place, though now with a French-language version this may soon change as well.
While the United States is unsurprisingly the number one country on Facebook in terms of number of users, today approximately 60% of all the 67 million Facebook members live outside the United States. The most represented countries after the US are Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, Australia, France, Sweden, Norway and Colombia, in that order. Due to the open nature of Facebook, however, some countries have banned access to it, including Burma, Bhutan and Syria, whose government said the website promoted attacks on authorities.
With its launch in France and elsewhere around the globe, Facebook hopes to beat out competitor NewsCorp’s MySpace, the social media giant that started it all, which already exists in more than twenty versions in the world.
Facebook, headquartered in Silicon Valley, was created in 2004 by then-19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg for fellow students at Harvard. Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, but was later expanded to include any university student, then later to high school students, and finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook quickly caught on at other universities, then at high schools, and spread across the US and around the world.
Facebook is free, and allows users to join one or more networks, such a college or high school, a company or geographic area in order to easily connect with other people in the same network. The name of the website refers to the hard copy booklets American colleges give to incoming freshmen as a way to get to identify people on campus.
When Facebook launched, it included several features that still exist today on the website. They include “the Wall”, a space on each user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages, “Pokes”, which allows users to send a short, attention-grabbing “poke” to friends in lieu of a longer message, and “status”, which allows users to inform their friends of their current whereabouts and activities.
The website now has more than 64 million active users worldwide. 1.4 million In France.
Facebook’s now 23-year-old founder Zuckerberg is the youngest ever self-made billionaire according to Forbes magazine. The site’s value has been estimated at as much as $15 billion (9.75 billion euros), based on Microsoft’s recent payment of 240 million dollars for a 1.6 percent stake in the company last year. Other big-name companies have been bandied about as possible buyers of Facebook, such as Viacom. But an outright sale of Facebook is said to be unlikely by founder Mark Zuckerberg, who wants to keep it independent. He said: “We’re not really looking to sell the company. We’re not looking to IPO anytime soon. It’s just not the core focus of the company.”
Facebook announced this month it had hired Sheryl Sandberg, a former top executive at Google, to be its new COO. In charge of business development, Sandberg will be tasked with finding new revenue channels — including targeted advertising — while protecting users’ personal data. She’s also at the forefront of Facebook’s international push. France is only the latest addition.
Last week Sandberg declared that Facebook can continue to add new users, while also making the site more useful to the ones it does have. And she emphasized Facebook’s international growth plans—in France and beyond.: “It’s just starting to become an international product.”
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