German Facebook clone StudiVZ is now getting serious competition in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Facebook just launched a localized German version of their social network. Today all Germans have to learn English in school, but most - even college students - prefer to do everything in their primary language.
Many successful international startups do not have the resources to localize right away and focus on the U.S. market first, which gave the various German Web 2.0 clones like StudiVZ a chance to grow. StudiVZ launched in fall 2005 and claims that they are having about 4.9 Million users today. Facebook, with about 700,000 members in Germany, only has a fraction of the users but the user base is expected to raise significantly now that the app is localized.
The German translation is still far from perfect but students and others will begin to see that the Facebook platform is way superior to the poorly copied StudiVZ. StudiVZ basically looks the same as Facebook did several years ago (besides the colors) and doesn’t provide applications, an activity stream or a mobile version.
Although StudiVZ has better connections to German media partners I do not think they can compete against the well-funded giant Facebook. In the end Facebook’s rumored cooperation with Nokia, where all Nokia devices might come with a pre-installed Facebook client, and similar deals will break StudiVZ’s neck. Only the people that have spent hours on StudiVZ collecting friends will have doubts to switch and stay loyal first. However, when more and more of their friends have left StudiVZ they will also embrace the change and join Facebook.
It will be exciting to watch the social networking war and Facebook’s launch will hopefully help to boost the German Web 2.0. You can count that I will keep an eye on this and in particular the usage of the already localized mobile version of Facebook here in Germany.
Kudos to zweinull.cc for pointing the German release out.
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