I've always had a deep connection to India, even though I grew up in the United States. I've spent a lot of time in the country, and though it took a while to learn my way around my family's hometown in rural Gujarat and even longer to study the languages my parents speak, it didn't take any time at all to learn what truly stirs passion in most Indians around the world: cricket.

Despite my limited exposure to the sport in the U.S., cricket season in India seems to turn everyone there into an avid fan. I become drawn to the heated debates about the best wicketkeepers and bowlers, and impressed at the intensity of team rivalries like India vs. Pakistan or England vs. Australia. Sharing this experience with my family members while I'm there makes me feel so much more connected to them and to the country—but it's very challenging to carry over this energy and excitement when I'm back home in the States.

As the popularity of cricket increases worldwide, more fans are bringing their passionate conversations online and onto Facebook. With more than 400 million people around the world on Facebook, including 8 million in India, fans can keep sharing in the excitement about cricket even when they're far away from the pitch.

While cricket fervor is quickly gaining momentum, especially now at the height of the Indian Premiere League (IPL), staying connected through Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect can help elevate it to a whole new level.

Show Your Team Allegiance

By becoming a fan of the Indian Premiere League Page, you can receive updates about key matches, discover interesting content and connect with other fans around hot IPL topics. Many league teams, such as the Deccan Chargers, Mumbai Indians and Rajasthan Royals , also have Facebook Pages where you can engage with other fans and get exclusive behind-the-scenes looks at your favorite teams and players.

Cricket news sites such as ESPN Cricinfo also provide real-time updates on the IPL and international cricket through their Facebook Page, share exclusive photos and videos, and offer fans with a forum to discuss everything and anything about the sport.

Connect with Cricket Everywhere

Facebook Connect lets people bring their real identity and friends with them wherever they are, whether online or on devices like a mobile phone. For instance, by logging into Facebook on websites like ESPN Cricinfo, you can easily share articles and comments back to your friends on Facebook.

Sites like Indiagames.com have also launched a series of exclusive web and mobile IPL cricket games that are powered by Facebook Connect. IPL Indiagames T20 Fever is an online game where you can select friends and buy virtual versions of popular IPL players to build your own cricket teams, and then compete for a chance to become the next IPL Champion.


IPL Indiagames T20 Fever can also be found on the iPhone, where people can use Facebook Connect for iPhone to build and manage their teams while on the go.

Through our Facebook Connect Live Feed widget, fans can even have a real-time conversation with friends, other fans and cricket players. Stay tuned this Saturday for a live web chat with Dinesh Karthik, captain of the Delhi Daredevils, on Facebook. Dinesh will be one of the first IPL players to chat live on Facebook with fans about his experiences at IPL and his views on the rest of the season.

As someone who's experienced cricket firsthand in India, I'm excited that more people can share their passion for IPL and international cricket. Because of their authentic connections on Facebook, fans now can participate in the same heated "living-room" debates about the world's best bowlers, wicketkeepers, and team rivalries—regardless of where they are.


Meenal, a manager on Facebook's international growth team, is patiently waiting for Team Bhavnagar.

What has large cuddly pandas, New York rock n’ roll, virtual coins and talking squirrels?  It’s Music Pets, one of the fastest growing games on the social gaming scene.  The game has accrued 700,000 users in only a month, and is one of the most talked about applications on my news feed.  The game is best described as a cross-breed between Pet Society and the Pandora music service…  Yes, you read that right.

Read on for the review!

As more and more people share and connect on Facebook, we are growing our operations and teams to support them around the world. Just last week, we announced plans to invest in a new Austin, Texas, office, and today in India we unveiled our intentions to open an office in Hyderabad.

Both of these offices will allow us to better serve the more than 400 million of you now using Facebook worldwide, as well as our growing number of advertisers and developers. We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we're forming in these new locations.

By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.

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.

The new operations centers in Austin and Hyderabad will supplement our support teams in our Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and office in Dublin, Ireland. We're proud to now call America's Lone Star State and India's City of Pearls home.

For job opportunities in either location, visit www.facebook.com/careers.


Don Faul, a director of global online operations at Facebook, is looking forward to brushing up on his cricket skills during his next trip to India.

The following is part of our "Your Stories" series on different ways Facebook is used across the world. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please submit it here.


David Slade's fiancée Kelly was the first to find the lost little dog. Standing in the driveway on her way to shop for wedding dresses in January, Kelly was surprised when the disoriented animal cheerfully run up to her. Kelly brought the pup, which she nicknamed "Mouse", inside from the incoming rainstorm to play with their own dogs. She left David to begin searching for the owner of the lost pet alone.

Neither Kelly nor David could have guessed that Facebook would play an integral role in the effort to reunite Mouse with his family.

The dog was wearing a collar, but no tags, leaving David unsure where to begin his search for the owner. Initially, he pursued traditional methods by calling the neighborhood vet and the Humane Society, leaving a phone number and a description of Mouse in case anyone had called to inquire. Once the storm clouds parted, he even went door-to-door in the area surrounding his home, but was frustrated when he realized that many neighbors owned similar small white dogs and all of them seemed to be accounted for.

The following day, David knew it was time to take a different approach. Fortunately, his neighborhood of Hillcrest, a small, older area within Little Rock, Ark., has an active Facebook Page with nearly 2,500 fans. David posted a photo of Mouse, along with the following short message to the Page's Wall.



Amazingly, within only a few hours, a woman named Lin Chan commented: "That's our TYSON! Thank you!"

Lin had been alerted to David's post by a phone call from a friend who had seen the post. "I quickly logged onto Facebook and was relieved and in disbelief when I saw Tyson's photo posted by David," Chan said. "My son, who is 4, actually cried when he saw the photo because he 'wanted Tyson home now'."

David and Kelly quickly contacted Lin after they saw her comment, and their Mouse, who was actually Tyson, was returned to the arms of Lin and her two sons in no time. During the search, David remembered a cell phone commercial he'd seen, where a picture of a lost dog is sent around town by text message and lead to his owner.

"I remember thinking 'if only it were that easy,'" David said. "Turns out it is."


Sara, an intern on Facebook's communications team, wishes she and her roommate could adopt a lost puppy.

At Facebook, we're constantly connecting with interesting people — from experts and researchers to celebrities or visitors to our office. Occasionally, we'll share these conversations on the Facebook blog in our "Connecting with..." series. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jonah Seiger, a pioneering Internet campaign strategist and the founder of Connections Media, where he develops online campaigns for U.S. issue groups, political candidates and companies. Most recently, he worked on the 2009 reelection campaign for New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Given that you have been working in Internet policy and online advocacy since 1993, what do you think, looking back, has been the biggest change that the Internet has brought to politics?

Transparency, and I think we still have a long way to go. But the ability of citizens, voters, to have access to source information, to engage with each other outside of the filter of the media, establishment and traditional media, has changed the whole dialog, and I think brought mostly good things to the politics of America.

Can you think a seminal moment where this was made clear to you?

The Starr Report (in 1998). I think it was like within the first 24 hours, it was downloaded 25 million times...People now have access directly to the same information that the reporter gets, and they can parse it themselves...

There were things that followed very quickly after that. John McCain's victory in the New Hampshire primary in 2000. I guess you would have to rewind and say Jesse Ventura's election as governor of Minnesota (in 1998). John McCain's fund raising success in the aftermath of his victory in the New Hampshire primary. Howard Dean's success in 2004. And then it just kind of cascades. People give Obama credit for inventing all this, (but) it actually starts a lot earlier than that.

The one change we have seen in recent years is the rise of various types of social media. How has that in your mind changed what the Internet can do in politics?

It gives more power to the true grassroots. It makes it in many ways a lot easier to organize, but more challenging for the top-down type of organizing. And it changes the calculus of a campaign's communications operation, because it's much more difficult to have tight control over every aspect of the message. And the tighter the control attempts to be, the less successful you will be in social media. You have got to give people the ability to add their own flavor and their own voice to your message, and that could be really scary.

The Internet is all about decentralization; it always has been. Social media extends that to another level. The ease of sharing (which) Facebook and Twitter and other platforms provide accelerates that. And I think it's great for politics, but it also makes it challenging for people who practice (politics), especially people who come from a more traditional approach to political communications.

Who do you think is further ahead: The everyday voter who is using social media or the campaigns themselves? Where is the balance right now?

What we continue to see—and this is not a hard-and-fast rule—is the challenger has an advantage because they have more degrees of freedom. The incumbent has more to protect, and so it's a little bit more difficult to embrace fully the openness and decentralization that the Internet and social media, in particular, provides.

So those opportunities are more available to the insurgent challenger candidate, that Jesse Ventura example, the John McCain in 2000 example, Obama.

It's why the success of Mayor Bloomberg in New York City is an interesting example, because he was the incumbent. He was one of the only incumbents to win since the 2008 cycle. (Gov.) Corzine had lost in New Jersey (and) the party in power lost in Virginia in that same election. So there are examples to the contrary, but I think it gives, generally speaking, more opportunity to the challenger...

Looking more recently, like in the past year, has there been any specific examples of either where social media played a really big role in the election or in the public discourse about an issue that surprised you in some way?

I don't know about surprised me, but I think the example that's most salient right now is the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts (as a Republican U.S. senator). There was a combination of Martha Coakley's campaign running a very traditional establishment (approach) against a very energetic challenger, who successfully nationalized the race using social media. And that (nationalization) channeled money, it channeled support, people talking about the campaign, generated press coverage, and just helped to propel them forward.

Now at the end of day, the election happened in Massachusetts, people voted only in Massachusetts. So nationalizing a race only gives you so much, but I think that story is an important example of some of what's happening with politics and social media.

What if you are not a Barack Obama or you are not a Mayor Bloomberg or you are not looking to even nationalize a campaign, but you are a local candidate or you are a political advocacy group. Are there certain things you can learn from what some of these big campaigns have done?

I think what social media provides is a new way of doing old things. Organizing has always been about talking to as many people as you can, to find those people who support you and get them engaged. Social media is one more avenue for that. It provides new ways of quantifying the return on every dollar or hour or new person that you are going after.

So I think that the same old tried-and-true tactics of organizing still absolutely apply, but the platforms that social media provide give you more efficiency, more reach, and may create opportunities for news coverage and an interest in your campaign that otherwise wouldn't be available.

So you have seen all these changes in the last decade-and-a-half of Internet advocacy, what do you think is the biggest change to come that we are yet to see?

I hate that question, because...technology alone is not the story. Technology enables things, but successful campaigns are about connecting with people, and persuading (people) that you have the better solution to a problem that's commonly understood... What I have seen is that the Internet has enabled more people to participate than might otherwise have. (It) provides a way of channeling latent public interest and attention in ways that can be measured and directed, and no matter what the next technology is that will still happen.

I do worry (that) as much as social media is powering greater participation in politics, it also has the effect of fragmenting and distilling (issues) to a slogan, almost. And I think it is becoming more difficult for us to have national conversations about complicated issues... I see it in the discussions about climate change, for example, and healthcare reform and creating jobs in this economy. We have lots of new opportunities to kind of shout at each other, and it's a little harder to build consensus around complicated matters...

Four years ago we were talking about podcasts. I don't know, is anybody still doing them? Blogs have found their natural place in the panoply of media. They are definitely having a major impact in challenging the establishment of media, but they have their role and we understand it now. Social media will settle into its own place.

So what's the next platform? Somewhere in (Silicon) Valley here someone is figuring that out. I don't know the technology, but the communications dimension, I think, is going to continue to be driven by people sharing information, and that's very cool and very positive.


Matt, a manager on Facebook's communications team, is connecting with his local candidates for San Francisco supervisor.