Ireland Sends Facebook Friend Request; Will Zuckerberg Accept?

Irish ministers and development agencies are trying to tempt Facebook to the Emerald Isle, the Irish Times reports, claiming enterprise minister Micheál Martin met Facebook executives during an October trip to California. In recent years, Ireland has managed to lure significant investments from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), and is strong on data centres. Facebook will shortly tap its own member community to translate the site in to other European languages. Facebook opened a London office in November – this has so far been just a sales office for the time being, but the company reportedly wanted to grow to 50 staff within a year. The Times said Facebook is weighing up two locations. Facebook’s UK press office told us: “We don