• Facebook to go Chinese

Facebook - one of the most (current) popular social networks, that was recently valued at $15 billion and received a big chunk of money ($240 million) from Microsoft, has decided to go after the Chinese market and registered the Facebook.com.cn domain name. At the moment, the domain is being redirected to the main Facebook (.com) website, but I bet that in the near future we will start seeing some strange characters that only Chinese people will understand.

While there isn’t an exclusive Chinese-version of Facebook, there already is a big number of people registered under their China network on the main website. And to please the students, which was the main target of the network when it was first created, there are groups for the top universities, such as Peking University and Fudan University.

If Facebook is already dominating this market, imagine when the network becomes a hit in China, which is simply the second biggest internet market, right after the US.

PS – I don’t have a Facebook account, does that make me a not-normal person?

• AOL bets on local Indian languages

Being the “online unit” of Time Warner has its advantages, and that is probably why AOL has plans to launch specific portals for Indians, more specifically in the Hindi and Tamil languages.

Their plan to dominate the world can be seen on:

- the organization to make the AOL portal available in 30 regions, on the future (end of 2008) of course.
- enabling the video searching function in some countries beside the US, like France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the UK.

Source - Reuters

Guest post by Tiago of Gadgetizer