Facebook took one more step further in its global ambitions today: the social network has now made its App Center, the storefront for Facebook desktop and mobile applications, available in every country where Facebook is.
Facebook, the site created so that you can share every detail of what is going on your life with all the people you went to high school with (I kid!), may be the last company you’d think would hide its light under a bushel. But this news, interestingly, came by way of an answer from a press spokesperson, when we were enquiring about availability in Finland, following up a tip we received from Finnish blogger Toni Aaltonen.
“The App Center went global overnight, so it is now live in Finland,” he told me in an email. “This is live everywhere now.”
This completes of the staggered rollout of the App Center outside of the U.S. It was first started in June with the English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. And just last week the App Center was extended to Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey.
As with the rest of the markets where the App Center was already live, this will mean that all users will now see an App Center bookmark on the left side of their homepage on Facebook.com, as well as in the Facebook apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Getting Facebook services like the App Center (and full mobile functionality, as pointed out by Josh yesterday) out to the whole of Facebook’s user base is an important, crucial step for the company as it continues to grow.
International users — that is, users outside of the U.S. and Canada — currently make up 81 percent of Facebook’s 955 million monthly active users, according to Facebook’s 10-Q form filed with the SEC yesterday.
But those users are not yielding a proportionate amount of revenues at the moment. International revenue, Facebook noted, made up 50% of revenues in the last quarter.
Giving global access of the App Center is central to the promise of wide availability that Facebook can make to developers to get them to make apps for the platform — and subsequently generate more revenue from the use of those apps, either through ads or purchases.
“We have made and are continuing to make major investments to enable developers to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with the Facebook Platform,” Facebook noted in the 10-Q, but also warned: “Developers may choose to build on other platforms, including mobile platforms controlled by third parties, rather than building on the Facebook Platform.”
The translation tools that Facebook launched in June will also help spur the international vision along.
Update: One more Facebook PR has now also confirmed the rollout.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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