Update: Moved this post from the reporters’ log to the main feed because it was attracting a bit of attention.
StudiVZ, the largest German university-oriented college network with 1 million members, is under fire for borrowing wholesale from Facebook, its site’s poor performance, and unsavory behavior by one of its founders. The venture-funded company has apparently met with Facebook, leading to speculation about a potential acquisition, but evidence of talks of that nature seems to be completely unverified.
Altogether this is drawing quite a lot of attention; StudiVZ is the third-most popular search term on Technorati at the moment. For an extensive English summary, see this post by blogger Karsten Wenzlaff, who has interviewed StudiVZ. Wenzlaff also points to mainstream media coverage of the issues from today’s Spiegel Online. (Thanks, Nico!)
There’s also a brief (though not really updated) summary at the Wikipedia, and another brief English summary at the start of this article.
Over the weekend, StudiVZ even was the single most searched for term on Technorati. Seems like if Facebook really want to take them over, they’d have a lot of work cut out for them.
It’s studiVZ not studioVZ. ;-) Just for technorati & co.
It’s actually called “StudiVZ” (“Studi” being an abbreviation/minimization of “Studenten”, german for students) as in the URI http://www.studivz.net
Sorry, my mistake on the typo.
Most dirt about StudiVZ is currently digged up by the blog http://www.blogbar.de/index.php
Esp. the stuff reported at http://www.blogbar.de/archiv/2006/11/15/708/ is disgusting.
“but evidence of talks of that nature seems to be completely unverified”
Well not quite. Check
http://www.blogbar.de/archiv/2006/11/16/studivz-learning-to-shut-the-fcuk-up-the-hard-way
for details.
Why I didn’t invest in StudiVZ
http://markeseremet.blogspot.com/2006/11/looks-like-i-was-right-about-studivz.html