The Fight Of Owning The Social Graph Now Goes Regional – Facebook Connect Available In 67 Languages
While Twitter may ask in its internal notes whether they are the Internet, the real topdogs in making their presence felt are really Google and Facebook, with their Connect Platforms. It is, especially for Facebook an escape of the problem that it faces the most in terms of monetization – People not moving out of the site.
That aspect nearly kills the bigger scope that advertising could have had on the site. Facebook connect is the alternative that they found, whereby they don’t change their skin or character but instead reach out to the whole wide web. The fight of owning the social graph as we call it here at WAT.
So when Facebook decides to open Friend Connect with support for Regional languages it is indeed interesting for the multiple avenues it can have an impact on. So yes, Facebook Connect has got a multi-lingual support.
All Facebook developers who’ve implemented Facebook Connect can now get to choose the languages in which Facebook Connect’s features get rendered. Users connecting or publishing content through Facebook Connect will appear in the language specified by the developer. This way, the user generated content will be presented in more languages and will be accessible to larger masses. (Source)
What Benefit Does This Serve?
Though it surprises us Indians a lot, English is not the predominant workplace language in most countries. And even within India the demand for regional content has been steadily gaining predominance (Though some experienced folk feel that wouldn’t be the case in the long run given our colloquial past). Regardless of the slight dispute, one can’t deny the existent of a lot of regional language driven content publishers on the web. Facebook can now reach out to their audience and thereby increase its user base. Pretty much the same reason they launched content in 6 Indian languages before.
For publishers this is another avenue to offer a more customized option to connect their reader base better and know more about their content consumers, which was the benefit Facebook Connect gave anyway. This story however follows quite close to Google Friend Connect launching in 47 new languages including Hindi. Facebook on its part has upped the ante with the integration of 67 languages.
Online ka King Kaun?
Now where does that place the two giants in this fight to own the web’s universal login key?
To my mind, Facebook has the higher ground. And this is not just because it has 20 additional languages (I don’t even know how many of them would even be used actually). However because of the inherent viralness it has compared to Orkut (with which Google Connect is now integrated). It gives publishers more options to spread on the social graph than Google at the moment and therefore more publishers are likely to use Fb than Google.
(Also read this post we wrote way back in 2007 on why Facebook will be the new Orkut in India.)
And the more publishers use these tools, the more their impact at the core business it will hold for these individual companies.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Leave a Comment and Follow the replies through Post Comment Feed