Facebook Crowdsourcing its localization

Yesterday while I was checking Facebook I got an advertisement in the News Feed that was announcing a new application created by Facebook to help with the translation of Facebook in Spanish. I closed the browser tab before taking a screen shot but after searching a bit around I found othe

r users that have received the same notification, below is a screen shot from a blog post from a Facebook user that got the same invitation.

While it is pretty cool that Facebook is finally being localized in Spanish, I think that considering the amount of money that they have, how little text there is in Facebook compared to other apps and how much upside in users (and therefore, advertisement revenue) they can get from having a properly localized version in Spanish, it is pretty lame that Facebook will use crowdsourcing for getting this work done. Crowdsourcing should be left for tasks where you really need a lot of people doing small tasks and that require continues refinement and contribution (Wikipedia, Flickr or delicious tags, etc.).

Facebook has only a bit over 200K people in the Spanish network and Facebook Insight (the app that helps prepare your target advertisement in Facebook) lists 270K people in Spain older than 18 years old, so very low numbers. And this is just Spain, I guess in all the Latinamerican countries the situation is similar and therefore, the potential upside even higher. Also, I do not see any potential local competition at least in Spain. So I think that they could have well spent money on hiring a professional translator and do this important task in house and in a timely manner and not using Facebook users for that. They are also running the risk of alienating users if they feel used improperly, they already did that with Beacon but it seems that they have not learn from their mistakes.

CD

Technorati tags: facebook, crowdsourcing

Comments

[Jonathan Trenn]

Hi Carlos

I understand what you're saying. There seems to be a trend toward having community involvement on things that can come across a being quaint, but in the end may be exploitation.

That being said, I have something that I'm inviting you to look at. Not fix, but you're welcome to use it. Moreso because of your lifestyle of living throughout the world. It's called ooVoo. (http://www.ooVoo.com)

It is a online video telecommunications service. We have several Spanish speaking people using it.

http://www.gigle.net/oovoo-beta-videoconferencias-para-windows-y-mac/

http://simonmuniz.com/?p=11

http://subi2xezequiel.blogspot.com/2007/12/oovoo-messenger-v-10373.html

We've been reaching out to people who have lived in different places throughout the world and I wanted to introduce you to it. Thanks.

[Tomas]

Hi Carlos,

I'm wondering which appraoch will win out in the end in the case of Latin America? MySpace's endless opening of offices worldwide, Facebook's collaboration translation (which will surely have many grammar and language issues)? I think it'll be a third appraoch, and that of localized players. Such is the case of Sonico.com (http://www.sonico.com), who un under than 6 months has managed to register over 7 million hispanic members and gaining an average of 100k new registrations daily to become the biggest and fastest Spanish social network.

[watch gossip girl online]

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