All I have to say is: Facebook finally noticed it. I already wrote about StudiVZ and Facebook a couple of times. It was just a matter of time until this had to happen. What leaves me wondering is why it took Facebook so long.

So, meinVZ now made it to 1 million registered users. It still is a totally closed system which is almost identical to StudiVZ. Maybe at some point they’ll notice that openess isn’t such a bad thing. At least they allow their users to have friends between the otherwise closed VZ networks.

From kress.de:

Four months after the launch the most recent network now has one million users, monthly page impressions are at 840 million. Less than 50 percent moved over from StudiVZ. StudiVZ, meinVZ and SchülerVZ now have 10 million users. [..] The company will generate “healthy double-digit millions” in ad-revenue this year, CEO Marcus Riecke told the FTD.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: changing your stylesheet from time to time won’t keep the users coming to your site – suing people for using two letters (“VZ”) of your domain name won’t either.

On another note the CEO stated he thinks the “market for social networks is saturated”.

So over here in Germany there has been this Facebook clone StudiVZ created in October 2005. The people behind it ran with the template, translated it to German and started their very own social network (another word to add to the ugh-list), with a different color, of course. I’ve been a member for almost two years now and while other services expanded, changed and got better – or died -, this one didn’t really do any of the above. The biggest changes were the addition of more and more advertisments, some privacy changes that got them into the major news concerning selling personal user information, etc., and the ability to share your status. Guess where they got the latter. Yip, exactly.
(more…)