Facebook Latest Gamble - A Billion Dollar Move?

Facebook, one of the fastest growing websites in the world, announced two significant developments in the past few weeks that could spur even further interest for the social networking powerhouse.

The first is an Arabic language version of the site intended to attract the region's 250 million native speakers online. In a story written by National reporters Tom Spender and Keach Hagey, analysts call the move "a development" in bridging the gap between the Arabic community and the online world.

While about a fifth of Arabs, 50 million out of a population of around 250 million, use the internet, less than one per cent of all

online content is in Arabic, according to Mazen Halawi, a corporate

sales manager from the Arabic-language search engine Ayna. Arabic is

the world's fifth-most spoken language.

countries, according to statistics from AllFacebook.com, which does not

However, the second and much more contentious announcement made by Facebook has

announced, is a radical makeover of its main profile page. Instead of

displaying a general feed of recent news, notes, friend requests and

the like, the site now resembles the new social networking site du jour Twitter.

Fresh

off the heels of a spurned acquisition attempt for US$500 million in

company stock, Facebook has unabashedly mimicked Twitter's

communication style, replacing '@' replies with a dour-looking arrow,

making user pictures in the same square-boxed manner and shifting

content boxes around for a more streamlined presentation.

While

users often show some measure of revolt whenever Facebook has changed

its look in the slightest, it appears that the noise has reached

somewhat of a fervant pitch, even within its own employees.

From ValleyWag:

disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster

Software developer

offers his frustration with the new design:

changes to the user experience. The problem is that you may eventually

Over at

suggest Facebook should have listened more to its users before trying to reinvent the wheel:

filtering using lists, it needs to make sure they know how. That's why

While it is understandable not to enflame the 180 million-odd users that login to the site, I tend to side with

that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is right to do whatever he wants

with his site - if only to position itself to finally make some of that

cash it promises to one day attract.

design and made some noises that she was only going to use the iPhone

Given that the recent events evoked a

that questions how Google could ever make any money - and we all know

how that turned out - maybe Facebook's latest move could be the start

of something big. Very big.

(Photo: Negin, a 21-year old Iranian woman, browses her Facebook page at her home in Tehran.

Credit - Newsha Tavakolian / The National)