Multilingual Social Networking Alert!

Included on the list? Facebook, with over 60 percent of its users outside of the U.S. The company is intent on chasing MySpace in the multilingual arena with broad plans to expand its global presence in a very local way. First up? Spanish, launched in February and completed in less than four weeks utilizing nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking users. Crowdsourcing with community-driven voting enabled approval of translations in record time.

Next? German, released barely a month later based on the same model, but with input from over 2000 German-speaking users, the site was up and running in 1/2 the time. TechCrunch is a great site to get the background on the effort as well as the application Facebook provided to get the job done. The third? French, but launch unknown as of today.