Facebook features different for other languages

facebooklocalization

Usually I am using the Polish version of Facebook. After I switch language to English (US) I'm getting few more features such as "Photos of… xxx", "Posts of… xxx" while typing in the search bar. In the Polish version it just doesn't show up – the function is not available. Why is that?

(The "photos of" function just shows a page with photos that the person was ever tagged etc. – even those that were hidden from timeline but still with markers.)

Best Answer

Facebook is an American company and the majority of its employees are in the U.S.

I'm sure they simply develop new features in English and deploy them to the "original" Facebook, then as time and demand allows, translate the feature to each language. By necessity features will show up on the "English (US)" version of Facebook first. (When Facebook first launched there were no other language versions.)

This seems pretty standard for any popular web app. Sure, with work you could build a system where you could launch features simultaneously in multiple languages, but that's harder and would take more time. There are cost considerations to be made; is that other language a big enough market and will enough people use the site to make it worthwhile?