Facebook stumbles in its march to take over the (online) world as a court in Cologne ruled against it in the Web site's lawsuit against German knock-off StudiVZ:
"Although there are overlaps and similarities between the two sites that are impossible to overlook, no dishonest copying could be established by the judge," the court said in a statement.StudiVZ had little to gain from trying to look like Facebook when it launched in 2005 because until September 2006 Facebook was only available in English and was popular only in North America, the court said.A German-language version of Facebook was not launched until March 2008, it said, by which time StudiVZ had over 10 million subscribers, StudiVZ spokesman Dirk Hensen told AFP.The court also said that Facebook had provided insufficient proof to support its allegation that StudiVZ had illicitly taken information from it, and that in any case its programming data were freely available on the Internet.
Of course, anyone who spends any time on StudiVZ can confirm that it IS a pure clone of Facebook:
The German court's decision was not legally binding, and Facebook has the right to appeal. It might choose to do so, since the Germany has by far the largest number of Internet users in the European market.
Surprisingly, no German knock-off (that I'm aware of) has emerged for Twitter, which is growing even faster than Facebook. According to Heise.de, there are more than 30,000 Germans who already "zwitschern". The recent re-election of president Horst Köhler generated a large number of Tweets. The blogger and photographer Olaf Bathke has the most Twitter Followers in Germany (3,586), followed by The German Green Party, according to Twitterholic.com.
Of course it's exactly the same! Oh well. Look at Explorer vs. Netscape.
I am on Facebook. Did not like it initially. Now I know how to use it (mostlyh for trivia) and find it fun.
Posted by: hattie | June 17, 2009 at 01:10 PM