14 DAY TRIAL // Why bother with working on some feature that will just set your other work back, when you can have others do the work for you? That must have been the company policy regarding the Spanish version of the page, for which Facebook gave its users total freedom to translate. That can't be right somehow, but I just can't put my finger on it.
Perhaps I'm thinking about exploiting somebody's love for your product and make it benefit you (one of the 1,500 people who allegedly worked on this was responsible for about 3 percent of the total), maybe I'm concerned with the eventual shortcomings that will be found when fans will disagree on something. Either way, I think it was unprofessional of Facebook to do this. French and German versions of the site are on route, both of which following the same road the Spanish site has come.
In all fairness, the social network did provide those willing to get to working on this with a special tool and voting options, in case a version was better than another, but that doesn't change it one bit. Translating the whole site (including applications, or widgets, as they are also known to some) is a tremendous work.
It's Facebook's time to be copying MySpace, after News Corp's own social network just took to opening its platform for developers, a method of gathering the crowds pioneered by Mark Zuckerberg's social network. MySpace already has its site available in 13 languages, and is ready to open new offices in Turkey, so a 14th is on the way. Almost gaining to the total numbers the dominant network has on a global level, this latest move on their part might prove to be the winning punch thrown at its adversary. Nevertheless, that doesn't make it right, to do what it did.