Facebook Fever

Check your Facebook! Has there ever been a day that went by when you haven’t discussed or heard someone else talking about the ever-popular facebook. The site that had originally been for college students to network, usually within their schools, and then branched out to the public is now embarking on a new campaign to attract international users.
Facebook has 64 million users, with about 2 million in the UK, however they want to introduce a new feature, a non-English version. The goal is to have this out by Easter. It is part of “an ambitious overseas expansion strategy.” The Plan here is to generate more users across Europe, in the non-English speaking countries, as well as in Australasia (a region of Oceania: New Zealand, Australia and neighboring islands in the Pacific Ocean).
According to Chandlee, Facebook’s commercial director, Facebook is also planning to expand its “Beacon platform,” which launched in October with 45 parnterships, some of them include Coca Cola and Amazon.com. Facbook is hoping to expand within the next 90 days; they want to open up to more international advertisers.
If Facebook enables people speaking and writing in other languages to access the site, it will increase this worldwide communication even more than it already has been. This is a big step for facebook, since it has only been over the past year and a half that they decided to open up their site to any users of all different networks. There has been some uproar about this feature of facebook, since it is now compared to myspace, which is creepster central. Even though facebook does allow any user to become a part of this online community, I still feel that it is not quite as trashy as myspace.
It would definitely be interesting to see how this international market changes things, with more connections to other people in other parts of the world. Also the marketing and advertising of overseas would be something to keep an eye on. Is the plan to market American products internationally, or will they then incorporate international products to America as well? I’m always interested to see different items, and how other countries promote them.