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(Credit: ComScore)

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace’s 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace’s 45.4 billion. It’s been a slow but steady upward climb for Facebook, which was founded by then-Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site was restricted to members with e-mail addresses from a handful of elite universities before gradually expanding to the general public and becoming a genuine Silicon Valley sensation when it kick-started the developer platform craze last year.

It was a very different story for MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and achieved mass-market success in a relatively short time by gearing itself toward independent bands and their fans.

MySpace, owned by News Corp. since 2005, nevertheless remains far ahead of Facebook in the U.S., where both companies are based. The same ComScore numbers found that MySpace has 73.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. versus Facebook’s 35.6 million, and that neither site grew much in the past month. Other number-crunching firms show similar results: a Compete.com graph of the two, for example, shows MySpace’s U.S. traffic shrinking a bit while Facebook’s is growing steadily, but not astronomically.

This appears to confirm the common wisdom that Facebook’s present growth is largely overseas. And that, of course, assumes that the numbers are accurate–online metrics firms, ComScore included, have been subject to plenty of scrutiny on behalf of Web companies and ad firms. Additionally, some of MySpace’s overseas traffic does not come from the MySpace.com domain; its Chinese-language site, for example, is MySpace.cn.

In January, Facebook unveiled plans to provide translated versions of the site, something that MySpace has done since 2006 after first launching separate versions of the site for other English-speaking countries like the U.K. and Australia. There are now 29 localized versions of MySpace, and the company has office space in 20 different countries. MySpace representatives have explained in the past that their aim is to build communities centered on regional culture, not to simply expand the same networking tool worldwide.

But the Facebook strategy appears to be working, too. Numbers released by ComScore earlier this week about Facebook’s growth in France suggest that the translated sites are having some positive effects in building international audiences. On Thursday, Chinese and Russian versions of the site debuted, bringing the translation offering to around 20 languages.

Overseas challenges
Still, even a fast-growing site like Facebook faces issues abroad. Ad dollars–typically stronger in the U.S. than overseas–still aren’t rolling in on social networks the way many expected them to, and last month Facebook took out a $100 million loan to keep pace with growth. MySpace, meanwhile, just rolled out a site redesign that aims to make it more appealing to both users and advertisers.

Then there’s the fact that while MySpace might be Facebook’s chief rival in the U.S., there are plenty of other social networks with big followings in different pockets of the globe that pose local competition. Orkut, run by Google, has a lock on Brazil and also eats up a big portion of the market in India. Hi5 is big in Latin America. Friendster, long past popularity in the U.S., has nevertheless gained a sizeable following in several Asian countries.

And Facebook continues to work on image issues. The independently run company, its valuation pegged at a jaw-dropping $15 billion after an investment from Microsoft, has also been boosting its executive team to lift its reputation from Palo Alto start-up to legitimate international corporation. This spring, the company courted Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, to join its roster in a similar capacity as a policy-focused PR czar.

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ComScore: Facebook is beating MySpace worldwide

On-the-fly reference can be a pain. Say you’re reading something with a word you don’t understand or that’s simply been written in a foreign language. Finding out what that word means usually requires a copy paste into Google and going to one of the free online dictionaries. If you’re lucky enough to be using Safari on a Mac, you can just hit Cmd-Control-D, which will pull up the definition from the built-in dictionary, but that’s not going to work on words outside of English, or if you’re on a PC, or using another browser. That’s where Lingro comes in handy.

Lingro is a translation and reference tool that lets you look up words simply by clicking on them. It works in one of two ways–either by having you run any link through its translator or by saving a browser bookmarklet that will automatically convert whatever page you’re looking at with a single click. The service also supports conversion of documents from your local machine as long as they’re a .Txt, .Doc, or .PDF file.

What makes the service nice is that it sits quietly in the background and pokes out with definitions only when you need it to. Also, if you run across something in another language while on any page you can also swap over to one of seven dictionaries and click on that word again. It’s a nice touch–that is as long as you know what language the word belongs to.

Lingro has also thrown in an element of crowd sourcing for its definitions. If you come across a word without a decent definition, you can add your own that will go on the list and be linked up to your account. This same account tracks all the words you’ve ever looked up, giving you a quick guide for later reference. It’s not just some boring list though, you can apply those words to little games. For now there are just flash cards that you can re-arrange and get rid of, but I’m assuming we’ll see some others in the future that are more fun to play.

To see this post with added definitions using the tool you can simply click here.

[found via ReadWriteWeb]

Want to read the German version of the Crave gadget blog? Lingro makes it easy.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Lingro helps you translate ginormous words

Google Translate just got more useful for a Prague citizen visiting India.

The online translation function now can understand 10 more languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. That brings the total to 23 languages, Google said in a blog posting Thursday.

In addition, Google added a language-detection feature that can guess the source language a user is trying to translate. It’s more effective with longer amounts of text, Google said.

Detect Language means you only have to click the language you want to translate text into.

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Google Translate speaks 10 new languages

GeekySpeaky is a small, growing weblog directory, now counting just more than 200 feeds. Feeds can be searched, browsed by category or latest additions and they can be submitted with three different methods: Featured links ($40) Regular links ($25) Regular links with reciprocal (Free) Once you are on the submission page, type a name, paste the URL of your feed, make up a description, select a category, provide your name

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ReadBurner is a free online service that aggregates items that are shared on Google Reader. This works by constantly updating RSS feeds of currently several hundred linkblogs: whenever an item is on multiple feeds, which means it has been shared by multiple people, it is automatically included. r. Shared items are divided into Popular, Upcoming, Most Recent, Popular This Week and Popular All Time categories. Adding a link to the

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228) ReadBurner