Thursday's Wall Street Journal offers an intriguing look inside Netlog (subscription required), a Belgium-based social network whose competitive advantage seems to be its early support for multiple languages. By using polyglot university students to translate the site into 13 languages, inluding Romanian, Norwegian, and Polish, Netlog brought in 12.6 million unique visitors in September. A dozen new languages are also in the offing.
Large social networks like MySpace and Facebook, the article points out, tend to focus on the U.S. market initially and later diversify into other languages. By focusing on languages out of the gate, Netlog has a clever competitive advantage.
The downside, however, is a related problem: many of the countries where Netlog's languages are spoken do not have a mature market for online ads. And of Netlog's 35 employees, none are ad salespeople.
