Facebook Wants You to Build Apps for the Countries It’s Struggling in

Facebook may not be the most open company out there, but it values the developers working with its platform. And Facebook has one of the hottest platforms of the moment, Zynga’s billion-dollar business can attest to that, smart developers can make a tidy profit on Facebook. The company is now encouraging developers to think at the social network from a global perspective. In particular, Facebook says several markets present real opportunity, incidentally, the markets where Facebook is struggling in.

“Facebook is growing rapidly in countries like Japan, Korea, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany, and the Netherlands. And as more users adopt Facebook, your applications have the opportunity to gain exposure and reach in these markets,” Huan Yang, a Facebook software engineer, wrote.

“In the next few months, as Facebook adoption continues to increase in Japan, Korea, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the Netherlands, we recommend both localizing your applications and implementing the new friend-selector tags that enable the contact importer feature. These improvements can help make your application competitive in emerging growth markets,” he added.

Facebook recommends developers localize their apps for those particular countries. This means having a translated version of the app, obviously, but also adapting to the subtle differences in each market. For example, apps can serve different content based on the user’s country, targeted precisely at that region.

The social network also invites developers build contact-import features in their apps. This way, every time users interact with the app via email, they can share their contacts list with Facebook and the app itself. Apparently, apps that use this feature have seen an increase in user adoption.

All of this sounds great for developers, but it’s probably even more important for Facebook. The social network is working on gaining momentum in all of the countries listed. In Brazil and India, it’s taking on Google’s Orkut, apparently quite successfully, and western services and products usually don’t fare great in Asian markets like Japan and Korea. Facebook is only the third social network in Russia and so on. It’s understandable then that it wants developers to focus on those markets hoping that it will spur adoption there.