Zuckerberg Draws a Blank on Facebook's International Development

Nate Elliott | October 22, 2007, 01:40 PM

At Web 2.0 last week an audience member asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook would handle international expansion and developing for different markets. From the video, here's the full question and answer:

Question: "Facebook has now become a global phenomenon, and I'm wondering as you think about mapping the social graph, what differences you see in other countries and other markets, and what sensibilities or sensitivities are required. I'm wondering how that influences your product development and whether you feel like you're going to need to establish a physical presence in those countries as you grow."

Zuckerberg's answer: "So, I mean, there are definitely some, some really fundamental underlying things. I mean, people all across the world all have connections, right, so the social graph and the underlying concept there definitely works in all these different areas, right, and we're seeing really rapid growth internationally right now. At the same time, people in different countries and different types of people like using different types of applications, and that's a big opportunity and also something that Facebook Platform helps us out with. And we're finding in some of the largest countries that we're in outside of the US, that, that I mean, there are a lot of local applications that have been built that a lot of the people there use. So, I mean, that's definitely a pretty cool thing that we're seeing."

A rather general response, to say the least. But the gist of it seemed to be: we're not thinking much about international markets, but rather we're letting third-party developers worry about that instead. This sentiment matches up with what I've heard from the company directly as well. When I spoke to Facebook about international expansion in August, they had no concrete plans to translate the site into different languages -- they thought that perhaps the developer community would use the open platform to handle translation for them.

Facebook's exclusive focus to date on English-speaking markets explains why the site, in fact, is not a global phenomenon. (The questioner let flattery get in the way of accuracy. While Facebook is perhaps the largest network in the UK and is doing very well in North America as well, they only have a very small presence anywhere else in the world: our numbers indicate they have less than 10% of the European social networking audience, and nearly all of that's in the UK.)

I know that Facebook is now ramping up their UK operations, but it seems like language translation -- if not complete cultural localization -- would be higher on their agenda. Instead, it looks like they'll keep ceding non-English markets to MySpace and local networks for some time to come.