Facebook recently launched their long anticipated Chinese language versions for China (Simplified Chinese), Hong Kong and Taiwan (both Traditional Chinese).
According to various user reports, their websites are taking a incredibly long time to load, which is due to the fact that the servers are still located in the US.
Facebook is a considerably late entrant into the Chinese social networking market. MySpace already set up a local presence in April last year, including local server hosting. IMHO it’s very questionable if this move by Facebook will have any considerable effect on China’s social networking landscape. I believe that Facebook doesn’t offer the users enough incentives to switch from already existing sites, such as the blatant 1:1 Facebook clone xiaonei.com, to its new service. Also, without an official licence, Facebook falls under the danger of being blocked by China’s notorious great firewall.
But on the other hand, I don’t think that the people at Facebook are stupid and it certainly doesn’t want their so far triumphant world wide expansion to be scarred by an inadequate operation in China.
