This is one of those once upon a time stories.
Back around a decade ago as folks started to note Facebook taking off and becoming something 'big'....some Germans saw the trend, and they wanted a German-innovation platform to exist.
We can argue about why they felt it had to exist....but it really didn't matter.
The concept? More or less....everything Facebook provided.
It was a race. And sadly, StudiVZ lost.
Today in a regional court in Germany....StudiVZ declared bankruptcy.
Poolworks is the company behind StudiVZ. They came into the court and just said that was it....the concept just won't make it. Total number of accounts listed? Ten million.
Most Germans who know of the social media site will say that it was trending down in 2011/2012, with no real way of bringing the business back.
How it started? Well....students came up with the idea around 2005. They took it up to a certain level. This was a project which came a year after Facebook started to arrive on college campuses in the US. The accusation that it was just a copy of Facebook? Well....yeah, that complaint did come up.
Another hard bit of criticism was the early-on hacker attack in early 2007....which forced every member to reset their passwords.
I asked my son (26 years old, and into geeky German stuff) over the platform. He responded that he'd never heard of StudiVZ. I would imagine that 90-percent of the folks under 21 years old never heard of it.
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