FACEBOOK, THE latest social networking site of the world became indigenous completely on Friday (May 8).

 

Facebook introduced some highly interesting features, which would help the users to navigate in the national language from now onwards. Apart from Hindi, it also offers service in various other Indian regional languages like Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, Malayalam and Telugu.

 

Now, the users can change the language settings through the ‘settings’ tab or the ‘language’ option on their Facebook homepage. Users can already perform the ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ Tamil and Hindi scripts in the multi lingual web site. The latest innovation would help the users a lot to browse the same in various other Indian languages.

 

But Facebook is not able to translate message in vernacular languages. Though the users can easily browse through Facebook in five different regional languages, they cannot send message to each other or update their status.

 

Orkut, the social networking site of Google and also the prime rival of Facebook offers transliteration facility in five different major Indian regional languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

 

The market research firm ‘comScore’ mentioned Facebook as the second most popular social networking site in India in their latest report. Orkut still tops the list.

 

While Orkut enjoyed 12.8 million visitors out of total 19.3 million in India at 2008, Facebook recorded only four million visitors.

 

The visit of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook in India in May 2008 became highly effective to expand the service of this new social networking site here.

 

The concerned authorities of Facebook are now planning to expand its user base over 200 million by reaching out to the vast netizens in India through regional languages.