Face-to-Facebook
Facebook's founder and CEO is travelling around China, boosting speculation that the social network is looking for a chance to expand in the world's largest internet market.
Mark Zuckerberg visited China's favourite search engine, Baidu's offices and has previously expressed an interest in expanding Facebook into China as well as swotting up on the local lingo- Mandarin, The Associated Press reported.
Baidu's director of international communications, Kaiser Kuo told the news service that Zuckerberg had lunched with the search engine's CEO, Robin Li and admitted that while he didn't know what they chatted about, the two men had met before.
It is thought Zuckerberg is touring China with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan and Kuo reportedly said that Zuck has a ‘long personal interest in China'.
Combined with the Facebook CEO's previous comments about moving into China, when he apparently said: "How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?" the rumours are rife that Zuckerberg is desperate to infiltrate the world's largest internet market and boost Facebook's 500m membership count.
However, such business prospects were reportedly played down by Kuo, who said: "C'mon people. Robin and Mark have known each other for a while. Mark's interest in China is well known. Keep the speculation in check."
While China is unfamiliar with Facebook, as the site is unavailable due to its censorship laws, apparently many Chinese people have heard of Zuckerberg, especially after his Time Magazine accolade.
It is unknown as to whether Zuckerberg was out of the country on Thursday when Facebook suffered an outage.
The site was down for around half an hour, according to T3 and was effectively switched off after an employee at the social network accidently put out a bunch of product prototypes into the public domain- oops.
They reportedly included a revamped photos section, extra page management features as well as revamped brand pages. One of the outed features is believed to reveal ‘memories' where users' online histories are made ito a chronological timeline.
Facebook's official Twitter page said: "Facebook is available again after being down for a brief period. We apologize for the inconvenience."
And 15 minutes later..."Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It's now back to normal."
