Comments on: Facebook’s ad page was not hacked, it’s a suggestion from a user

By: Oo.. the Nigerian guy.

Oo.. the Nigerian guy. — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:50:27 +0000

Advertizing is Lying says Facebook. They are right! {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/prgTETtVxC_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Advertizing is Lying says Facebook. They are right! ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/kbHSIxFtZO”}}}

By: StevieB’s Shared Items - January 8, 2009 at Lost in Cyberspace

StevieB’s Shared Items - January 8, 2009 at Lost in Cyberspace — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:06:14 +0000

[...] Facebook’s ad page was not hacked, it’s a suggestion from a userJanuary 7, 2009 [...]

By: Facebook’s “Lying” Ad Platform Mystery Revealed.

Facebook’s “Lying” Ad Platform Mystery Revealed. — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:49:11 +0000

[...] the word “Lying” appeared as a result of its language translation application, reports TechCrunch. This was, in fact, an English to English auto-translation that managed to allow the word lying to [...]

By: Burak

Burak — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:08:40 +0000

Why would you translate from English into English?

Also, in this case wouldn’t ‘Fake Degree/Loan Shark’ be more accurate?

By: Peter C

Peter C — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:41:27 +0000

reddit does a similar thing for translations (English, German, Pirate, LOLCATS etc) — they have a “secret” page where you simply translate all the fields on their site in a differnet language.
Cool idea.

By: Matt Randall

Matt Randall — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:30:35 +0000

I attended a Facebook seminar in November and I remember them saying how all the localisation was crowdsourced to users.

This allowed them to translate the Facebook interface much faster and cheaper than hiring in a team of translators for each language.

I have them quoted as saying it took them only 24 hours to get a Spanish version of the Facebook interface complete and 1 week for the French version.

In contrast, back in the day when Yahoo were translating their portals into foreign languages, they hired dedicated translators at the cost of millions, and the average translation time for each language was 9 months.

I guess the important message is crowdsourcing is very useful for getting things done faster than you could achieve just using your employees or hired in contractors.

However, it is crucial that you have gatekeepers in place, who monitor exactly what your crowdsourced effort is up to, so as to avoid embarrassment like this. It also reminds me of the Wikipedia article vandalism that happens from time to time.