Watch out! The Germans are cloning the internet!

April 20, 2008 by Mark O'Neill |

Freundfeed In the words of the immortal Yoda, “Begun the Clone Wars Have” - and the Germans seem to be behind it. Because for every site that pops up online, the Germans produce a clone of it. Friendfeed is the latest victim with FreundeFeed about to blossom into the world. I am starting to feel a Basil Fawlty joke coming on.

The biggest example of the German tendency to clone is Studi.vz which is a very popular German equivalent of Facebook, so much so that the real Facebook gets kind of overlooked by the German audience.

As Techcrunch points out, there are also German clones for Twitter, Geni and eBay. But in these instances, the original versions are much better than the ripped off German clones.

Whatever happened to invention, original thinking and entrepreneurship? It’s become much too easy nowadays to rip off someone else’s idea, slap a beta label on it and repackage it as your own idea. It’ll be VERY interesting to see how long “Freundefeed” lasts for and it’ll be even more interesting to see if it is even legal in the first place.

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6 Comments »

Pingback by An Englishman snob | Nicki Brøchner

2008-04-20 12:31:53

[...] that there are anything particularly special about German and French that will lead them to create carbon copy clones of popular web application other then they are both cultures with proud traditions when it some to [...]

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Comment by Balu Subscribed to comments via email

2008-04-20 15:10:45

Now, come on. Of course people are copying to get a piece from the cake. The German internet market is quite big.

But the main reason for this is that most American services don’t translate their frontends to other languages than English.

And my relatives - especially the ones with no technical background - simply don’t understand a word.

PS: You won’t get millions of funding for weird ideas (aka internet projects) like Twitter here in Germany either. So people clone what’s working already and what seems to be promising…

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Comment by DWiner

2008-04-20 15:31:59

How about ‘geeksaresexy’?

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Comment by Kishor

2008-04-20 20:23:44

Do you mean to say that there should be only one social networking site in the world? Wouldn’t it mean that all other sites have copied the concept of social networking from other sites?

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Comment by Ted

2008-04-21 09:26:49

If I was German, I’d start Geekssindsexy.net

Except from we all know how sexy Germans are.