Friday, October 1, 2010

Facebook has a face in India

The enticing and addictive Facebook now has got a face of its own in India. And that face is beautiful and creative – as creative as the social networking site itself.

With top MNCs such as CA, CSC, Accenture in the neighbourhood, Facebook chose to adorn its walls with paintings from local artists. Why, it announced a competition for local artists to submit their proposals for original designs to decorate the office space.

The social networking site, which posed a serious challenges to Gmail and its social networking site Orkut, has a global membership of 55 crore, with at least 50 per cent of them using it every day.

“Beginning today, artists can visit facebook.com/FacebookIndia to enter the contest. It is open till October 22, 2010,” Ms Kirthiga Reddy, Director (Online Operations and Head of Office India), said.

Showcasing what Facebook colleagues would do in office, she said India had emerged as a very important market for Facebook, with 1.5 crore users. The centre would act as a support and research centre. It would also support developers and marketing initiatives.

“There are 100 crore people in India. We have huge scope to build up the base,” Ms Meenal Balar, International Marketing Manager, Facebook Global, said.

However, the company, which expected authentic information from the users for getting a face on the Net, remained tight-lipped on the number of employees, investments, profitability and revenues. “Being private, we are not going to discuss financials,” Mr Don Faul, Director (Online Operations) of Facebook, said.

Where it stands

Mr Faul said about 3.5 crore users update their status each day, and 5.5 crore people wrote something on their ‘walls'. “People share 350 crore pieces of content such as Web links and photos each week,” he said.

An average user had 130 friends on the site, spent 55 minutes a day on the site and became a member of 12 groups.

As the company began to use more and more premium mobile handsets, the company was targeting the potential in that segment.

Security

Reacting to queries on the security challenges social networking sites posed, he said the company was aware of this problem and kept tabs on patterns to check abuse. The site looked for real people to enrol as members to “make it spam free”.

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