An true.

How likely is it that anybody would be making this site if any of the myopic, money-averse, user-hostile American outfits being cloned simply pushed out translations of their own sites in the first place?

@John, localisation takes money, language support and time. 3 things most start-ups are short on. Makes total sense for any company to start and nail it down right in the language the 4-10 people working there know best. Also creates an (perhaps unfortunate) opportunity for others to copy in a diff language.

They even link to this article… Are they proud of what they’re doing?

And what about http://www.plazes.com ? They already innovated out of Germany, when Web 2.0 didn´t even exist as a label. I think you even covered them on your first day.

I’d rather say, they’re doing it right.
They don’t even have to start a marketing campaign or whatever, your annoyance is totally enough to bring those guys into one of the biggest blogs ww.

And by the way: Bosch, Einstein, Röntgen, Reis, Daimler, Gutenberg, Diesel - I think Germany is just taking back what they’ve given to yanks and the whole world few decades ago.

that’s why I have to leave this country as soon as possible, sf sounds nice I guess

Well, while I agree with the whole innovation thing, you might also see this as a consequence of US startups ignoring the international audience. So, you can wait for something like eBay or Facebook to be translated to german, or you can DIY and wait for them to acquire you (happened in the case of eBay/Alando.de).
Sometimes, the innovation part then happens a short while after the copying. In any case, it helps spread the ideas and social networks internationally, which is never a bad thing.

The Freundfeed ripoff of Friendfeed is terrible…..

I would say rather silly actually because the logo/name/font are so similar that most people would think that it is the same organisation. Why build up something you know you will receive a cease and desist letter as soon as you have the slightest traction?

Xing and Internations.com are very good German start-ups and I think that it is a bit unfair to characterize all Germany based on just a few. Anyone visiting the company review section of Techcrunch can see dozens of US based copycats. The only difference may be whether copycats are VC funded or not and for that I am not so sure.

More and more it sounds like that a global strategy is the way to go for many start-ups from day 1 anyway.

Sorry you guys from freundefeed, but this is so ridiculous that I really, really hope FOR YOU that you’ll never launch this site. And if you do, be prepared that friendfeed.com will sue you and blow you right off the internet landscape. The friendfeed guys have millions in their pockets from their Google stock options and will surely not hesitate to get rid of you.

Guys like you are really a pain in the ass for all entrepreneurs that are honestly looking for international acceptance and maybe even venture capital. I’m ashamed that this happens again in Germany.

@Michael: I think I can proove you wrong about German startups in general though - please don’t be so focused on these ‘black sheeps’ which are only looking for making a couple of quick bucks.
There IS real innovation coming from Germany and I hope you’ll gonna cover it on TC as soon as we’re launching http://lifestrea.ms to the public.

“Web innovation in that country too often distills down to “copy/paste innovation.””.

Ever taken a look at “Unternehmen Patentraub 1945″, a book covering how US government took thousands of patents after WW2? Its easy blaming someone a copier without taking a look at the own history… But this of course is no excuse for starting a copy&paste website…

@Dominik #53.
Seems like there is no bad publicity, huh? I’m staying with the original.

What is your real problem with copycats respectively freundefeed?
The fact that we have a copycat mentality all over the world (not only in Germany!) or the manner how freundefeed is copying.
BTW: it is just a homepage where you can enter your mail address … not so much copied so far

Oh, Michael! It is a joke of course. It is a joke that makes fun of your “German copycat” rants :-)))

Too bad you are only mentioning Germany when it’s about copycats, Mike. We can offer you so much more and so much innovative things. No need to stay focused on those copycats. And you don’t actually know if this is really a copycat. Okay, the logo looks the same and of course, the name is friendfeed with a poor translation. But they haven’t started yet. Give them a try. I guess they want to generate some buzz and then start over with a new logo. Just a guess.

StudiVZ and its design is stolen from Facebook, we all know. But they are really successful here. They reach the audience they want in Germany and moth of teens know them or have an account. Much more than Facebook or even MySpace (which is used for discovering new music by the youth). I can confirm that, I am a German teen myself.

Anyway, thanks for the post.

I don’t know why you cover things like this. Is that the only way to make it into TC with a german startup? Publishing weak viral videos or just rip off?

Take http://oneview.de as an example. Oneview was founded 1998 (!!!) and is a social bookmarking platform.

Del.icio.us = 2003
Digg.com = 2004

So please Michael. It would be great if you would write without prejudice. If you need german bloggers with web 2.0 knowledge - let me know - we have a lot of them.

Hahaha! The Americans are just too slow! Why not release a German version at the beginning? No! The only focus on the American market and wonder if copycats from Europe appear

@T.Hieb, see my answer on #52. Of course they’re going to focus on the american market if they’re americans, duh. What kind of company is going to launch out of the gate in 17 different languages they have to support. Answer: 0. Any startup needs to get its own version right before running off to support other languages [of which they might not even be able to communicate with their customers].

But there is a lot of other good stuff coming out of Germany, much of it not in English (yet?).

#66 Dude… Don`t post with my name…

http://www.zweinull.cc/freunde.....#more-1146

This one hits it

Tobias, this wasn’t you? That’s one of the reasions why I have my comment stream: http://del.icio.us/thcomments where I bookmark the permalinks to the comments I’ve written.

Well. Most Germans are bettter in engineering than having good business ideas. That’s for sure!

@Biernot

The problem is, that the german internet users are 2-3 years behind the US users. Many german users have no idea about typical web 2.0 features. Example: Twitter. In the US twitter is popular. In Germany twitter and the german copycats are not working. Thats very gloomy… German founders have ideas - but you cannot follow your ideas if the market will not accept your product.

Now, this is really bad behavior. The guy also works for a company that invented social tech news … kidding, that made another digg clone.

I thought it would be a good idea to post your remarks there; maybe s/o wants to digg, err, “trnd” this news on tectrnd: http://www.tectrnd.com/index.php

As usual - it makes sense to try out a copy cat as a business. And be it just for the reason that the German market is big enough to sustain nice revenue if you play it right. Also, due to the language barrier it is not as if most of the ‘inventions’ of web20 ever arrived in the public conscious.

Something like Flickr still is considered exotic.

As usual also, local does not necessary mean translation. And in the specific case of Friendfeed: As long as they fail to manage the language separation of content I might just go on and make (as usual) 2 accounts just to keep the languages straight. Which is dividing the scenes (english / no english) further.

Which opens up the gates for more ‘copycats’. And I have to believe there is a grumpiness against Germany here which I think it is uncalled for. There are other startups copying successful startups, but you call them competition, unless they come from Germany. Why is that?

Also you seem to ignore if they take it further and just stay with a narrow view “they are just copycats” - why is that as well?

btw: germans spend 18.5 billion euros (that is 29 billion dollars) last year in online shopping. If startups neglect such a market, they cannot really complain about others taking the chance.

[having the same kind of name and logo of course is stupid, you need to play it correctly. Any VC investing money in this could rather throw it out the window as Falk said - the critical mass will not come].

@Tobias
You’re wrong. Germans are not like 2-3 years behind. It’s more like some kind of culture issue. I bet that twitter will never become popular in Germany.

Let’s take the example iPhone. What a hype in the US. But the Germans take it cool and only a few people are really interested in to get one.

I don’t like the iPhone either. Not worth its money.

I know the guys from Freundefeed - they are working at the moment to make a copy tiger out of the copy cat (growing bigger than the original) - and they want to change the logo as well. Hey - its all about speed going online ….

@Michael the idea of a SocialStream is not a innovation of friendfeed.com. In that way Friendfeed is also a copycat It`s nice to see how you make PR for Freundefeed. But i agree, i don`t like the stupit logo and name copy!

Russian social networking site http://vkontakte.ru (In Contact) is a direct rip of Facebook, except maybe a few months behind.

freindfeed should have bought up domain names that could one day be competition as part of its launch strategy, since they couldnt think of that, serves them right,

Also copies are http://www,spirofrog.de is a copy of http://www.monster.com

And http://www.whatsyourplace.de is a copy of http://www.plazes.com

But who cares? ideas are not “secure” ..and the Net is fast !

Best Thomas

I left you a picture and a little not on the subject of German copycats here: http://wagner.journalspace.com/?entryid=944

In regards to Freundefeed, if you check the top German sites for RSS feeds and APIs, beyond Mister Wong, who does have RSS feed for all pages, but no API, other German sites are far from being able to offer their service in this feed, so I don’t see how freundefeed is going to be of any use to the Germans.

Thanks for the link

@Dan Johnston, Trust me, this is not from Mister Wong. Of course any German site like this would or should include Mister Wong. But Mister Wong just acquired http://lifestream.fm/

@Jodi

Be fair!

There are a lot of German sites who do have RSS feed for all pages. Your comment is to “biased” as a member of the international Mister Wong Team.

If I would be unfair, I could say, Mister Wong is a German copy cat of http://www.oneview.de but I would never do that ;o)

check Wikipedia for details:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneview

http://newmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Bookmarking

“History

The concept of shared online bookmarking dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, most of this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst. The contemporary concepts of social bookmarking and tagging took root with the launch of the web site oneview[1]in 1999 and del.icio.us, in 2003. “

@Marcus, I was being fair. I was only stating what the problem is. We have this problem as well, which I even said. I was referring to the kind of sites people would especially want a feed from, when you compare to similar services in English (aka the copycat versions). I will leave it at that because I am not going to name them. I am not dissing any site, not even freundefeed. If you read my comments, and also see that Michael named me in giving the tip about freundefeed, then you should realize, I only did something good for them. I’m not a mean, jealous, or hateful person, so I don’t roll with such tactics.