Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerman in Harvard, and afterwards began life catering first to Harvard students and then to all high school and college students. It has since evolved into a broadly popular online destination used by both teenagers and adults of all ages. In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States.
In 2008, Facebook was available only in English. Still, nearly half of its users were outside the United States, and its presence was particularly strong in Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries. To break into non-English speaking countries, Facebook began an unusually large scale effort to have its users translate the site into more than 80 languages. Other Web sites and technology companies, notably Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had used volunteers to translate their sites or programs. But with 300,000 words on Facebook's site - not counting material posted by users - the task was immense. Facebook not only encouraged users to translate parts of the site, but also let other users fine-tune those translations or pick among multiple translations. Nearly 300,000 users participated.
The effort paid off. Now about 70 percent of Facebook's users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.
The rapid ascent of Facebook has no company more worried than Google, which sees the social networking giant as a threat on multiple fronts. Much of the activity on Facebook is invisible to Google's search engine, which makes it less useful over time. What's more, the billions of links posted by users on Facebook have turned the social network into an important driver of users to sites across the Web. That has been Google's role.
Facebook movie comes soon.
A trailer you can watch here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHkYEC-UfTo
According to:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org
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