You are right, Verwandt.de is not a clone, it’s intellectual theft. There is a difference between taking cues from something and stealing someone else’s idea and changing the color.

FTI…. stealing is not Innovation, you idiot!

That is not saying anything about the reprehensible activity in Germany, of stealing other people’s ideas and business models. All these German companies should get sued and absorbed. Otherwise, why doesn’t some startup just start making DMW B Series and Mercedes 3 Class and 2LK or YW Bassats and Lettas….. steal the plans and slap a different color and logo on them.

What Germany is doing and allowing and what the US industry is not considering in their strategies and not fighting, stifles innovation and progress.

Ultimately, the clones will not survive because they are based on a stolen platform that was not the result of great minds coming together and built in a language that is limited in scope.

I hope they have coming to them what they deserve, failure and ruin.

I joined a German service/social network I while ago, which I believe deserves to be mentioned together with Xing and others coming from Germany: sleeq.de.

Sleeq’s focus is the ability to see where your friends are and what they are doing. Yes yes, I know there are similar services, but the good thing is sleeq’s extremely local touch (sleeq has listed tons of pubs, restaurants etc. in the city where I live and in many other cities). I don’t care if Bruce is skiing in Switzerland or Donny is looking for blondes somewhere in Sweden. No, when I come home tired from work I want to see if anyone of my friends is having a beer at the pub ten minutes from here or if someone is up to something that I can join. There’s also a calendar function to plan stuff in advance, like meeting up to play soccer or plan other events (I just saw that I’ll be having a couple of beers on Saturday ).

Anyhow, it’s kind of addictive to “sleeq in” and to see where my friends are, either online or via text messages to my cell. And also, on Sunday (after those beers) it will be comforting to see that most of my friends are sleeqed in as “tired at home”, feeling just as crappy as I do

Regards,
Mike (a.k.a Schwede at sleeq)

P.S. There is also a “flirt alarm”, which somehow alerts me if that hot “sleeqer” has sleeqed in close to where I am – but I guess I should ask the Mrs. before I try that one…

whiney googagin.

This would be so damn easy and provide a market of at least 100 million more people. And close the room for copycats right away.

So why complain if all that happens here is that people in Germany use Business Opportunities, just like it has always been.

why does flickr received those problems during the launch of their german localization? why is linkedin far away from being a true competitor to xing in germany? why lost del.icio.us its position of being the no.1 bookmarker to mister wong? cause they do not seem to look to this market in-depth, and that is why we have a potential for adapting (or call it copying) successful ideas in this market.

So what? Just as America was well capable of innovation in he late 1800s, though the car example suggests otherwise, this is true for Germany (or rather Europe) today. You’ll find plenty of clones and plenty of original ideas. Going both ways.

Here’s a challenge: I believe the company I’m currently building, Trupoli.com, to be an original idea. From Germany. It’s a rating platform for politics. Though the US is way ahead in Web-Politics, I haven’t found anything similar there. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

My reading comprehension is just fine, in fact you just reconfirmed it by your statement on another site “Copying EXACTLY THE SAME LOGO and UI” as yours. Again, do you see much difference? You certainly didn’t appreciate someone copying your work did you? It’s the same principle with this site, in fact it’s worse.

you have a problem with someone copying your logo and UI, but you think it’s ok as long as it’s not your site huh?

The ‘couse of that is: if you in germany build a new maschine or an engine for a car, you get a whole of money. But if you build a web startup … you get nothing, if the application is something new and not proven.

So the most german SartUps copy&paste killer apps and say, that the application is workin’ in US;-)

Basically, i dont think improving existing business models isnt that bad- no one blames Mr Ford, Detroit, that he built cars which were developed in Germany.

But the exact copy of layout, colors and design is a pure shame. How is this to be justified?

I used Ahnenblatt.de for many years, to manage my family tree. Its free, it allows the full privacy and more importantly, it allows importing and exporting into/from all major genealogical Data formats. I also entered some data into Geni.com, but my family did not adopt this for more than a couple of days.

So Sven, if verwandt.de has a function to import and export into genealogic data formatted files, this is the first major point in your favour.
Second however, there must be a certainly well thought concept of privacy vs. sharing of data, i.e. not everything I can see, should also be exportable.