Comment by nilsjuenemann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nilsjuenemann | Hacker News Reader

I remeber these days. I worked at this time for studiVZ - a german social network (still exist, but nobody is using it anymore) and this leaked was caused by a misconfiguration in their Apache setup.

In 2008 studiVZ was sued by Facebook. They said we theft their PHP, CSS/JS "code". (http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/facebook-sues-german-social...).

Indeed, the first version of studiVZ was inspired by Facebook. Our founder had seen FB in 2005 the first time in the US, but it wasn't possible to use the service without a .edu eMail account. That was the decision to make a local clone.

But the real story behind the lawsuit is a bit longer. In december 2006 Facebook tried to acquire studiVZ the very first time.

This picture with two of the studiVZ founder and some people from FB's management team is from this time:

http://img-a4.pe.imagevz.net/photo3/f3/9a/ce37499d84437cb744...

But FB hadn't the amount of cash to aquire the company. The Holtzbrinck Publishing Group aquired studiVZ later for 85 mio. €

In 2008 (before the lawsuit) FB tried the second time to acquire studiVZ - this time for 4,8% of shares! But this deal didn't happend - unfortunately.

Cool, i remember these days as well. Indeed it very much looked like StudiVZ just used FBs css filed and changed some colors.. It was a typical german clone success story. Dariani did a lot of questionable things but sold in the right time before the downfall of VZ.

I didnt really like it, they basically did nothing in terms of innovation that FB did, it had the same features for years. Later they had a half-assed app platform that never really took off. It was just a blatant rip-off like so many german startups, sadly.

We had to solve scaling issues most of the time. VZ was running on a multi-tier platform with services written in Java, PHP, Erlang, C++ and Python. 17 million users with around 25 billion requests per month (without static content)...

Some numbers from 2010:

- 60.000 req/s (without static content)

- 2.5 mio. memcache ops/s

- 300k queries to the database tier

We've built that platform with a team of around 20-30 engineers and we had to solve the scaling stuff first - before we could add new features to the platform.

Today it's easy to store 3 billion files (photos). You could easily use S3, but 2007 these services didn't exist or most of the cloud services just started with their services.

I think Facebook had the same problems. Maybe a bit bigger ;)

Excactly. But you can't compete if don't have enough (and the best) people and enough budget for recruiting.

Just curious, what social networks are popular in Germany now? And what led to the declining usage of studiVZ?

Both questions can be answered with Facebook. For messaging though, Whatsapp is very common here these days. I don't like the service at all, but you're almost out of the loop if you avoid it - well, at least among my friends.

I think the most popular social network is Facebook. But as others said, people are looking for small services to solve a small problem.

studiVZ wasn't cool anymore. We missed the point for a rebrand to open the plattform for other people. "studi" is a abbreviation for student. Our answer was a new brand called meinVZ (just another UI, same database). Together with the ability to provide new cool features (e.g. Apps, Activity stream, i18n) it was just a question of time until FB was getting the market leadership.

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