Just got wind of a german Facebook clone, studiverzeichnis.de. By and large it seems to be a one to one copy of the original (save the replacement of “blue” in the code by “red”). Ever since I saw my cousin Mher use Facebook for the first time (it’s limited to people with .edu email adresses and Mher studies at UCLA) I wondered how long it would take until something similar for the german market would be created. But I didn’t expect it to be that similar. I wrote a mail to the CEO (if that’s what he is?) to find out more - I wouldn’t want to spend time on a page that just illegaly copied the code from a succesful original. But it turns out that they’re having some sort of cooperation with the Facebook owners. I don’t know what terms & conditions the studiverzeichnis guys had to agree to, their CEO was very tight-lipped about that, but he confirmed that they’re having an agreement.
Well, I like the facebook design and functionality and I’m surely going to use “Studiverzeichnis”, invite some friends and play around with it. Though I hope they are going to change their name and logo soon. Especially the latter is a total nightmare.
Anyhow, I won’t start to go crazy about an image just like some other folks like to do these days. Check out what some funny guy called “deenem” had to absorb when he had to read my post on the freedom of depiction:

Why don’t you go and fuck you own mother? I think this wouldn’t be problem for your bitch mommy.Bastards.

Deenem, thanks for your opinion and your comment. I know you guys have started to boycott danish products, because it was a danish newspaper that originally posted the boring cartoons. Now that those images have been posted all over the web, wouldn’t it be consequent to stop using the internet?

UPDATE: I got another email by the StudiVZ CEO. They do not have any cooperation with Facebook, although the Facebook people supposedly know about StudiVZ and the striking design similarities. Also, check out the comment section of this post to read a clarifying statement by Dennis, one of their developers, regarding the possibility of stealing code from dynamic webpages.
This said, I think it’s even more curious why Facebook would let someone else conquer a huge, by no means saturated market with a concept that exhibits such striking similarities to their product (although StudiVZ’s CEO Ehssan Dariani pointed to some new features that are unique to StudiVZ, e.g. a spotlight on new people in the system and a stricter privacy policy).
I fully support the idea of a german “facebook” and up to now I’ve been enjoying their system - yet I wonder whether things really should/are that easy from a legal standpoint. As their developer Dennis put it:

And if it looks very similar? Well, Pepsi tastes like Coke. Is Pepsi illegal?

Well, apparently it’s not - but to my best knowledge it would be illegal if Pepsi started to use a logo and can design almost undistinguishable from Coca-Cola.
Anyhow - in his email Ehssan Dariani assured that there is nothing illegal about their business and I will just assume that he’s telling the truth.

technorati tags: facebook , freedomofspeech, denmark, studivz , comments

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