It’s been tough times for Ehssan, founder of StudiVZ - personally I’ve never seen anyone being put down so hard by the German blogosphere - it almost seems as if a bunch of bloggers decided to make this their primary topic.
And of course, the old media at some point just has to follow.

Anger got aggregated over a bunch of “ouches”, I won’t list them all, it’s way too many for a single blog post:

1- StudiVZ is a copy of Facebook.
This isn’t new, but the persistent denial of being a mere copycat on the part of the founders turned out to be the wrong move. They’d been better off telling the public right away - “Facebook is such a great site and all we did was to bring this to Europe.” Instead, they pretended to be the geniuses behind the popular “poking” function (which is one of Facebook’s killer features)

2- StudiVZ has significant scaling problems ever since they hit the 300.000 user mark (or so, nothing magical about this number). The general experience of using their site has been and still is pretty bad. (Yet they’re still growing with a healthy 10.000 users a day and just reached 1 Mio)
All I know about this topic is that it takes a bunch of very skilled engineers to scale a webservice for this kind of userbase (esp. when you’re growing so incredibly fast).
At Lijit we’re lucky to have Dan, who combines great skills with a lot of experience.
As far as I can see StudivZ was mostly relying on one of their co-founders, a computer science student, to get this job done. I do not know of any CS classes that teach you to scale a webservice for millions of users - maybe universities should start to offer these? If I’d be a computer science student these days, I would try to learn this as fast as possible.
Maybe StudiVZ should just stall their internationalization (they’re now expanding to other European countries), disable new sign ups and get some expert consultants to fix their back-end.

3- StudiVZ grabbed their competition’s other European domain names and offered them to buy these back for generous 5000 €.

Hell, yea! Why should you only “do evil”, if you can “do very stupid AND evil” at the same time? If they really need that money so bad, they shouldn’t be shy and bring it up at the next board meeting.

4- The team apparently kept deleting criticism on StudiVZ’s Wikipedia entry.

It sucks to get a bad review of your Startup on a blog. I can see how it sucks even more if people are ranting about you on Wikipedia, but well, at least you can go there and just change it. I’m not sure how daring their changes to this criticism have been, so I won’t comment. The current version of the article seems fair to me.

5- Privacy, Stalking: I guess this is the only issue they really expected to see when they launched the site. Of course all the other problems now act like a magnifying glass when it comes to the expectable, natural stuff.

6- A lot of personal stuff about Ehssan, the founder. It’s mostly about his failed attempts to do Nazi-Satire (which is something that shouldn’t fail if you’re in Germany, even if it’s clear that you aren’t and never have been a Nazi), a strange habit of digicam-filming reluctant girls in Berlin and putting those self-compromising videos up on YouTube.

I have some opinions about good or bad jokes, just as I have some opinions about how one should or shouldn’t flirt with girls, yet I’m reluctant to comment on this directly as many other’s have done. This ranges from mere rants to open letters to the investors, demanding them to fire the founders.
I won’t join this party, because (1) I don’t care about the founder’s private life and (2) I think that this stuff distracts from points where decent criticism about StudiVZ would really make sense. Frankly, many of the posts on this topic seem to be fueled by envy.

Just this: Ehssan has never been a shy person and he consciously decided to use his personality to promote StudiVZ, which can be a good move as seen with Kevin Rose and Marc Zuckerberg.
Yet aggregated attention by itself is neither good nor bad - it simply can mean that at some point people are watching every step you make, so you better watch it, too.

He didn’t do so and apparently the board has told him to refrain from any external communication (e.g. the official blog) - these things are now taken care of by professional PR folks.
I can’t help to feel sorry for him - are all these bloggers aware that they are about to destroy this person?

Criticizing privacy and stalking issues on StudiVZ is one thing, but if you’re ranting about the founder’s private life, you’re operating pretty much in the same dirty space.

Why not use our power in a meaningful way, e.g. by improving the service on our terms?

Give Ehssan a break.

UPDATE: SPIEGEL ONLINE, Germany’s no. 1 source for online news, published an article that criticized StudiVZ’s stalking and privacy issues. What strikes me as bizarre is that they include a screenshot (that exemplifies the look of StudiVZ’s group feature) on which readers can clearly identify the names of the group members (which usually would only be accesible to members of StudiVZ). I made a screenshot of this, but naturally won’t post it here.

: StudiVZ, Ehssan, Spiegel, Privacy, Facebook, Dariani

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