Udo's Techblog

Maybe it's kind of telling that instead of just saying "fuck" in situations that merit explicit interjections, Germans instead tend to say "shit" whenever appropriate. Maybe it's because we as a people are what classic psychology describes as anal (retentive). We love laws and regulation. We love things that have a kind of "official touch" that makes them seem appropriate. We love things that are (or at least look like they are) approved by the government or some other body of authority. We love stupid things just because they are available in German. Germans are among the very few populations in the world who are utterly incapable of consuming movies in the English original. In fact, putting anything on the market that hasn't been translated into German? Unthinkable, will never be accepted!

Facebook is currently the de facto standard of the social web. But, you see, there is no German user interface available. And even though 99% of German university students are perfectly capable of understanding even most complicated vocabulary like "friends", "profile", "networks" and such, it is also (sadly) totally unavoidable that German academics have to have their own Facebook clone. Enter studivz.de, which translates as student directory (but sounds strangely official and authority-approved). StudiVZ started off as a bit-for-bit clone of the Facebook UI, except they exchanged the blue color for red orange. Now, Facebook has developed somewhat, whereas StudiVZ of course, well... has not. It has none of Facebooks built-in features except the basic social networking stuff, and it also doesn't support applications. But that's OK, because Germans would only ask things like "why do we need applications anyway, nobody would use them". *sigh*

Careful observers will also note that Facebook has, you know, actual content - whereas StudiVZ instead has, well, advertising that takes up one third of the screen real estate.

Needless to say, everybody in Germany is on StudiVZ.