Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, has chosen to set up its first Asian centre in Hyderabad—India’s city of pearls and home to numerous multinational IT companies. The social networking giant, who celebrated its sixth anniversary last month, intends to set up an operations and support centre in India to better serve its 400 million-plus customers, of which India alone accounts for 8 million. The announcement came less than a week after the company announced it would open a new centre in Austin, US. The Hyderabad centre would house online advertising and developer support teams and provide round-the-clock, multi-lingual support to the site’s users and advertisers globally. With this, it joins other giants like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell and IBM that have already set up shop.
Social networking services have grown at lightening speed leading to a dramatic improvement in people’s ability to communicate with one another. According to a report by Gartner, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users by 2014. It also predicts that by 2012, over 50% of enterprises will have activity streams that include microblogging.
Facebook, currently valued at $11.5 billion, has grown at a rapid pace in a comparatively short duration. Its users post about 55 million updates everyday and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content every week on the site. The site has also managed to move way beyond its ‘just American’ tag—currently, 70% of Facebook users are outside the US and are accessing the service in more than 70 languages. According to Hitwise, Facebook also became for the very first time the most visited Web site in the US for the entire last week, surpassing the Internet giant Google.
The network giant has played on its diversity card this time, stating that a phenomenal increase in its Indian users’ network is the reason behind setting up of its Hyderabad centre. However, it seems that the main motive behind this is to tap the skilled Indian workforce that provides quality services at relatively cheaper wages. Whatever may be the motive behind such a move, this is an apt opportunity for Facebook to begin a new chapter in the era of global interconnectedness.
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