Facebook goes Indian with new interface

In an attempt to capture fast-growing Indian eyeballs, Facebook, possibly the most popular social networking site on the Internet, has launched an interface in six Indian languages - Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, Malayalam and Telugu.

''Do you speak Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil or Malayalam? Now you can use Facebook in any of these languages to connect with your Indian friends all over the world,'' said a welcome message on the homepage greeting users on Friday.

Privately owned and operated by Facebook, Inc, the free-access website enables users to join networks organised by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people.

Indian members can now opt for any of the six languages through option tabs on the homepage. However, Facebook does not provide facilities for transliteration or copying of English script into any another language in online chats or messages.

Facebook users can only browse through the site in the five regional languages and not message each other or update their status yet. On the other hand, rival Google's social networking site Orkut has Indian language transliteration in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Facebook is the second most popular networking site in India after Orkut, according to market research firm comScore.

Orkut recorded 12.8 million visitors of the total 19.3 million on social networking sites in India at the end of 2008 - three times that of Facebook, which recorded four million visitors.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University.

It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 200 million active users worldwide.