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Facebook Needs to Internationalize

Targeted Ads

Web2.0 has basically boiled down to one business model:

  1. users receive free services
  2. in exchange for personal information
  3. which then drives targeted ads

Google took this almost non-existent targeted ads business model and made it into The Business Model of the decade. Google is trying to acquire the online ad agency Double-Click, Microsoft has made it’s largest acquisition ever, buying the online ad agency aQuantive for $6 billion, and Yahoo acquired online ad agency Right Media, all in 2007.

Facebook’s Anti-Business Model

Facebook

Facebook, on the other hand, has been recklessly trying to start their own targeted ads model and failing while repeatedly crossing the user privacy line. They first introduced “feeds” which scared people and caused an uprising. Then they introduced Beacon which scared users even more. Google probably has just as much, if not more, information from users but goes out of their way to extract trends and then disassociate. Facebook instead shows user-associated information to the public and people may not be willing to take it much longer.

Internationalization

Currently, Facebook is growing rapidly enough in the UK and US that it doesn’t matter how many times they screw up. They are not moving into new, international markets like Google and Microsoft so eventually Facebook’s screw-ups will start to stick. FB has made any real attempts at a business model in their current markets and almost no attempt at the international market. With China and India growing so rapidly, this looks like a terrible mistake. The English speaking population of the world is finite and Facebook is nearing the end of the rope with no clear direction in sight. Facebook needs to internationalize.

Mark Zuckerberg was recently interview on the TV show 60 Minutes which touched on a lot of what I talked about in this post.

Wired posted a cool French article with some graphs and states to back up my claims.

Wired also posted a story stating that Facebook is finally starting to pull some real-life executives into the mix. This is a critical step in what might save Facebook from business and operations model extinction.

    None Found
  • For now the only got a investigaiton going on their privacy policy!
  • I'm going to go ahead and toot my own horn here:
    http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/zuckerbe...
  • One thing about internationalization - it's a pain with PHP. Unicode support is non-existent at the moment. It's going to arrive in PHP 6, but who knows when that's going to come out. They've already decided that namespaces are easier / quicker to implement than Unicode, as they have pushed namespace support to 5.3 instead of 6.0.

    (And from looking at their leaked source, I'd think they aren't even running 5).
  • Many smaller PHP projects have figured it out. I'm sure a $15 billion company can manage. I don't think it's technological challenges that are keeping Facebook from reaching other markets, I think it's a conscious decision.
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