Facebook is going Chinese

A Chinese version of Facebook — the networking site that is so popular that it is overtaking email and SMS — has just been released. It has two versions, a simple and a traditional language format.

The reason for this eastward expansion is that the Chinese Internet market is the fastest growing and largest in the world, and has already been tapped by other companies such as MySpace.

But there is one hurdle: the Chinese like being anonymous, especially after years of state restriction on free speech, so it is likely that this social networking will not be as popular in China as it is everywhere else. Undaunted, Facebook plans more launches to add to its 20 language sites.