The mammoth social networking site plans to set up support teams for online advertising as well as developer teams in Hyderabad
The 400-million-plus social networking giant, Facebook, is set to log into Hyderabad, its first presence in Asia so far. The centre will house online advertising and developer support teams.
Along with Hyderabad, Facebook will also set up shop in Austin, Texas. On Sunday, in a blog update, Facebook's director of global online operations Don Faul said "Both of these offices will allow us to better serve the more than 400 million of you now using Facebook worldwide, as well as our growing number of advertisers and developers. We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we're forming in these new locations."
Through multiple support centres in a variety of time zones, Facebook plans to provide round-the-clock, multi-lingual support. This is a significant move, considering the fact that 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. India alone contributes to over 8 million active users, DOn Faul said.
The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product made by the prep school of the founder, Phillips Exeter Academy, which, for decades, had published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the "face book". Facebook, as we know it now, was founded on 4 February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, while they were at Harvard University. It is headquartered at Palo Alto, California. It started by having its membership limited to Harvard students, and then to other colleges in the Boston area including Stanford. it gradually expanded to include more students, and then to anyone aged 13 and above.
Facebook is blocked in several countries, including Syria, China, Vietnam and Iran.