Facebook finally gets its own ‘face’ for Germany: The sleuths of media newswire Kress Report got wind that Facebook could hire the advertising expert Scott Woods, who previously headed the Last.fm office in Hamburg. His new job is to build up contacts with brands and advertisers in Germany, as he already did for the music site. It was only last year that Woods got appointed as senior vice president and managing director for Germany at Last.fm. His Xing profile says that he stopped working there in February of this year.
Since March 2008 German Facebook members have used the website in their own language. But the social network never showed ambitions to open a local office. Woods’ assignment as an advertisers’ contact is seen as a first step in this direction. He built up the Hamburg office for Last.fm from where he oversaw marketing, advertising and business development in Germany and Northern Europe. Before that he had worked as head of strategic partnership and business development Northern & Central Europe at Google.
At the very same time Twitter has announced its roll out in German, as well as in French, Italian and Spanish. Like Facebook they are looking for free ride from users translate. “We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first”, says the blog post. The company will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well.