Battle for Europe continues with translations of Facebook and LinkedIn
Written on March 3, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe - just offer language support - is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
5 Responses to “Battle for Europe continues with translations of Facebook and LinkedIn”
By Rick on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
As a user, I have mixed feelings about localization. I really dislike the MySpace (and for instance Google) style approach when it come to forcing users into a local context by default.
It totally pisses me of to visit a site I’ve used for so long, and suddenly be treated like a dumb ‘local’ instead of a world citizen and/or a member of a global community. Offering the option is one thing, assuming this is what every users wants is patronizing and alienating.
Offering a translated interface is something fundamentally different from putting foreign users in their own little reservation, many US sites don’t seem to get that.
By Richard on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
I share Rick’s sentiment. One of the things I like about the Interwebs is the fact that I feel less like an Austrian and more like a world-citizen when using it. Sure, sometimes it’s nice to have localized content, but most often than not, localization efforts like translations don’t enhance a service for me.
I understand the desire of a company to tap into an international market, but for many users, being able to use a service in their native tongue is not a priority.
By Mark on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
I think that Facebook will not succeed in expanding more into European market with localized versions, since most of the apps will be in English anyway and therefore the result will be a horrendous mixture of words in two (or more) languages. They might do just as “good” a job offering a link to BabelFish. MySpace has the same problem, the local version just wrecked the site. LinkedIn’s approach might prove to be the best in turn. The way these companies are handling the internationalisation issue, they might end up losing the game in Europe completely.
By Mark on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
Actually, I have a internationalisation pattern suitable for making ANY site good for ANY market, without any of the negative aspects that have come with the internationalisation of for example MySpace, but the space here is not enough for more than outline and besides if you want to hire me as a consult it is going to cost you.
By Oscar Cooper on Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
If I were Viadeo or Xing, I would not be scared because of the partnership of Apec and LinkedIn. Apec is half government funded organisation. Most of the people using Apec do not speak very good English but LinkedIn is available in French only. Highly skilled professionals in France do not use Apec to look for jobs. It depends on what kind of people Viadeo and Xing want on their site, if they were aiming for the high-end of the job market, they don’t need to worry about this partnership.