Beijing — Popular online social networking site Facebook.com has announced a simplified Chinese version of its website targeting mainland Chinese Web surfers in an attempt to compete with local and overseas rivals in the world’s largest Internet market.
Facebook and Chinese IM (instant messaging) admirer Tencent appear ready to join the battle for China’s social net-workers, as both have launched Chinese sites recently.
“Volunteers will offer free translation to users.”
Users in mainland China logging at the Chinese version of Facebook website are diverted to zh-cn.facebook.com, which is in the simplified version of Chinese used on the mainland.
A version in traditional Chinese, the script used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, is also available.
A spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
Currently, Facebook — an online network that allows users to create personalized pages and link to others is available in 20 different languages — released French, German and Spanish versions this year. Almost two-thirds of Facebook’s more than 67 million users live outside the United States.
The Chinese version of Facebook seems to be the more subtle, as it began popping up on Thursday, and only to certain users of the site who are based in China. Even visitors going to Facebook’s “.cn” domain are still routed to the main English homepage.
“Thursday we announced three new Facebook languages: Russian; simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. This is part of our ongoing effort to enable anyone in the world to communicate and share information with the people they know, regardless where they live or what language they speak,” Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost confirmed by e-mail.
Facebook is playing to get closer to News Corp’s MySpace, which established a Chinese-language Web site in April 2007 and has tapped into over 20 countries globally.
It is also believed that Facebook will work together with media company TOM.com to market the site in China. Billionaire Lee Ka-Shing, who is a major investor in Facebook, also has ties with TOM.com.
The speedy growth and widespread recognition of the Silicon Valley-based company has created a flurry of Chinese copycats, including Xiaonei.com and Zhanzuo.com.
In May, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, immensely popular at home for his visits to quake-hit Sichuan, emerged as the 10th most popular politician on Facebook. China overtook the United States to become the world’s biggest Internet market with 221 million Web users by the end of February, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre.