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Hot on the heels of Facebook overtaking Orkut as India’s most prominent social network with 21 million vs. 20 million unique visitors in July,  the company officially opened its much anticipated office in Hyderabad earlier this week. Facebook Hyderabad is Facebook’s second International office, after Dublin, Ireland and the Indian team will include more sales and operations as well as multi-lingual support staff in order provide round-the-clock international support.

From the Facebook blog:

The new offices come at a significant time in our international growth. Seventy percent of the people using Facebook are outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. In India alone, we’ve seen rapid growth and now have more than 8 million people there actively connecting on Facebook with their friends, family, and other people they know, both within India and around the globe.

Hyderabad, India’s ‘City of Peals,’ is often called “Cyberabad” as it is the Indian base of many other technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Oracle HP, Dell, Motorola, IBM, HP and Amazon. Social gaming giant Zynga also recently set up an outpost in Bangalore, in an effort to capitalize on the sizable Indian market.

Video of the traditional Indian opening ceremony, above. Highlights include American Facebookers awkwardly dancing Bollywood-style and an impressive Facebook cake.

Thanks: Amit Bhawani

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Yesterday, Facebook held a developer’s garage event at their headquarters in Palo Alto. To kick things off, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to talk a bit about the history of Facebook. Notably, he focused on Facebook Photos as being a key catalyst that led to everything the social network is today.

He noted that when they launched the product, they didn’t have all of the features that their competitors did. For example, they didn’t have high-resolution photos and you couldn’t print them. But one thing they did have was the social element — and this changed everything.

“Those features by themselves were more important than anything else combined,” Zuckerberg said of the social elements of Facebook Photos. He then dropped the competitor bomb. “The photo product that we have is maybe five or six times more used than every other product on the web — combined,” Zuckerberg stated.

Wow. Everyone knows Facebook Photos is huge, but if Zuckerberg’s stats are accurate, it’s becoming YouTube-level huge compared to their competitors. Of course, what he means by “used” isn’t entirely clear — do they just browse more, or upload more as well? Either way, it’s massive.

And it was clear from both Zuckerberg and CTO Bret Taylor’s talk at the event that photos to them was the harbinger of things that eventually came — and will still come.

Taylor noted that he had been “brainwashed by Silicon Valley” before he saw and understood the power of Facebook Photos (he was likely working at Google at the time). He had been thinking like an engineer about the best way to organize photos on the web. But he quickly realized that “the best possible organization of photos is around people,” Taylor said.

“There are ten other industries waiting to have this type of disruption,” Taylor said noting the travel industry, e-commerce, and music as a few of them. Earlier, Zuckerberg agreed. Because of the social element, “every single vertical will be transformed.“

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Some people don’t like ads. But a new class action lawsuit in California against Facebook (embedded below) thinks it should be illegal for teenagers to like any ads without first obtaining parental consent.

We’ve written before about the legal implications of using the likeness of Facebook members in advertising, but this time it is not a joke. And the issue is Facebook’s “Like” button, not using the likeness of a person to plug a product. On Facebook, you can “like” any status update or post in your stream, but you can also “like” ads. When you do so, it can appear as a status update to all your friends if that ad is linked to a Facebook page, thus turning the “like” button into a social endorsement. (If it is not linked to a page, liking an ad is simply used by Facebook to help them determine the quality of an ad, and it will not appear in your stream).

The class action lawyers claim that in the case of teenagers, Facebook is “misappropriating the names and pictures of minors for profit.” Facebook might say that it is in its terms of service, that’s how the site works. But the lawsuit hinges on a loophole in California law which requires parental consent in order to obtain a minor’s consent for using their name or likeness for an advertisement, And Facebook doesn’t do that. Lawsuits like this one could result in anyone under 18 having to get their parents’ permission to sign up for Facebook, which might not be a bad idea.

Something tells me that the lawyers are more outraged here than the teenagers (in so far as outrage can be fueled by greed). This is not the first class action lawsuit against Facebook, and it won’t be the last. I’ve asked Facebook for a response.

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