StudiVZ – Germany’s Facebook clone and with about 4 million registered users largest social network – has surpassed T-Online as the most trafficed site in Germany as tracked by IVW in May and has been enjoying massive growth in traffic and page impressions during the last couple of months:

Page Impressions in billions according to IVW:

Nov: 5.2
Oct: 4.4
Sep: 3.6
Aug: 3.2
Jul: 3.0
Jun: 2.8
May: 2.5

Time to milk that cow, but since the existing TOS and privacy policy were in the way of their ideas for monetising the platform they will change them effective December 20th and let their members know that they have to agree to the new terms by January 9th or their accounts will be suspended.

Significant changes include: accounts can no longer be deleted, like in Facebook they just become deactivated; members proactively have to agree that their personal data and analysis of their clickstreams can be used for serving targeted ads on the site, but also via text message, email, IM or phone; studiVZ can share user data with third parties if allowed by law.

I agree that studiVZ can share my user- and/or usage data with third parties if allowed by law and/or legal regulations or precedences.

Ich willige ein, dass studiVZ Bestandsdaten und/oder Nutzungsdaten von mir an Dritte weitergibt, wenn und soweit die Übermittlung der Daten aufgrund gesetzlicher Vorschriften und/oder infolge von Gerichtsentscheidungen zulässig ist.

Users can object to some of the changes regarding the usage of personal data and can opt out of getting ads delivered outside of the site it seems.

The phrasing of quoted section is disturbing though. I’m no lawyer but they seem to give themselves a carte blanche for doing anything they want with users’ data should they ever feel like it. We have seen an outburst of rage in the press, in blogs, from politicians and privacy advocates and concerned users alike and they just published an emergency press release stating that they don’t sell user data (they use the present tense in their clarification), that protecting their users’ privacy is their highest good, etc. to extinguish the fire. But there is a difference between sharing data (e.g. with law enforcing agencies) if required by law and sharing data with unspecified third parties if one way or the other allowed by law.

Anyways, it will be interesting to watch what they come up with and what they get through with both legally and with their users.

Further reading (in German): FAQ changes of TOS, StudiVZ setzt auf Schnüffel-Werbung [Spiegel – StudiVZ places its bet on spy ads], Heftige Kritik an Datenplänen des StudiVZ, [Welt Online – StudiVZ’s plans regarding privacy data under attack], Werbung und persönliche Daten: neue AGB für StudiVZ [heise – Ads and personal data: new TOS for StudiVZ] / basic thinking, blogbar, e-commerce-blog, kooptech, off the record, netzpolitik, nitchimoo and many more

MyMuesli – a startup which lets you assemble and buy your very own organic cereal mashup, see our coverage here, and here – has been announced the winner of the Startup of the Year award hosted by deutsche startups. Congrats, we love them too.

Based on readers’ suggestions 10 startups have been picked as nominees (Bab.la – a language portal and social dictionary, Brands4Friends – a vente privée shopping site, Guut – a woot style live shopping site, hiClip – a white label solution for video streaming, Luupo – a shopping site with a gambling twist, MyMuesli, Netmoms – a social network for moms, Platinnetz – a social network for best agers, Smava – a marketplace for peer to peer landing, verwandt – a social genealogy site) and a nominated jury picked the winner. Most jury members have been impressed by the charm of the idea and by the fact that they were able to see a real business model.

Quickly noted: Three months ago Burda has invested a seven figure sum in Seed Media’s ScienceBlogs to bring this concept to Germany (see our coverage). Sooner than planned they launched scienceblogs.de yesterday kicking off with 13 blogs.

Launch partners include The History Channel, Deutsches Museum and news portal Focus Online who also will syndicate the best of ScienceBlogs on their portal.

(via)

In related news: Focus Online also teamed up with The Huffington Post and will feature articles of Arianna Huffington translated to German.

construktiv GmbH – the makers of Mister Wong, websnapr, mypictr or pixer.us – have launched Beam it up Scotty, a small but useful tool to easily send files to mobile phones.

You can upload photos, videos, music and any other type of documents on the site, have it compressed and optimized for mobile devices if you want and the service will send you a text message with a download link to your document for your cellphone to use.

Beam it up Scotty if free, you can access your files for 7 days, usage is limited to 10 docs a day.

Stock exchange community sharewise has added a Twitter-style live ticker for stock related rumors and quick facts. The feature is dubbed Börsengeflüster [stock exchange whispering] and combines posting of short messages with digg-style voting.

screenshot of Börsengeflüster

It is interesting, actually it’s pure genius, that they leverage twitter for posting the rumors and info snacks. Users can post their messages on the site of course, but they also can use a Twitter account. Once an account ist verified for a user direct messages sent to Twitter user sharewise will be posted on Börsengeflüster.

Since Twitter can be accessed via various channels (IM, SMS, Skype, …) they inherit Twitter’s fantastic connectivity and don’t need to implement it on their own. At the same time they also promote and pay respect to Twitter.

Related posts:
Sharewise – A New Stock Exchange Community
Are You Smarter Than A Monkey? Find Out On Sharewise
German Startups and Twitter

Update: as you might know blognation has closed its doors. I will update this list at the Museum of Modern Betas, you can find the most recent version here.

My first post here at blognation Germany back in July was a list of 50 Popular Sites From Germany. In the 5 months since about 500 new sites – on average 3.5 each day – have launched, with the end of the year approaching perfect time for an update. Without further adoo here is the list of the 100 most popular sites from Germany right now:

1. pageflakes (7129) – a start page and personal news aggregator

2. mindmeister (5679) – lets you create, manage and share mind maps online

3. ultimate-flash-face (4196) – fun site which lets you assemble faces via a minimalistic interface

4. websnapr (2318) – lets you capture screenshots of web pages or provide (slightly annoying) hyperlink target thumbnails

5. favicon.cc (2199) – create and share favicons

6. amberjack (2112) – lets you easily create site tours of your website

7. mypictr (2025) – a picture resizing service (e.g. to to create a custom profile avatar for social networks)

8. musicmesh (1770) – aggregates music videos from YouTube in an interesting way

9. studiverzeichnis (1653) – Germany’s largest social network for students and was largely inspired by Facebook. Earlier this year it was acquired by Holtzbrinck for an estimated 80 million euros.

10. pixer.us (1621) – edit your photos online using only your browser

11. popuri.us (1560) – check the link popularity of any site based on its ranking, social bookmarks, subscribers and more

12. logo-creatr (1455) – lets you instantly create Web 2.0 compliant logos

13. xing (1278) – a popular social network for business professionals. Xing went public in December 2006.

14. spreadshirt (1014) – lets you design and sell your own T Shirts (and accessories.)

15. map24 (994) – provides various map services, was acquired recently by Navteq

16. chefkoch (904) – a food and recipes community

17. fotocommunity (852) – online community for photography

18. mister-wong (786) – Germany’s most popular social bookmarking service

19. seitwert (729) – calculates the popularity of your site at various search engines

20. plazes (675) – detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby

21. photocase (606) – a community for photographers

22. podcast (543) – a podcasting portal

23. myvideo (532) – a video sharing site. This one belongs to the Pro7/Sat1 Group

24. qype (521) – a community which enables anyone to search for & review service providers, businesses and public places.

25. mnemomap (520) – an experimental search engine

26. anymails (512) – an experimental visualization of emails

27. iliketotallyloveit (486) – a digg-style aggregator for cool, hot, beautiful stuff, preferable with a link where it may be bought

28. holidaycheck (462) – a platform for hotel and trip reviews with a social twist

29. mabber (396) – a web based instant messenger

30. favoor (395) – a start page which lets you organize your feeds, bookmarks and notes

31. teamslide (386) – lets you give online presentations

32. yigg (384) – a popular digg-style aggregator

33. jimdo (364) – lets you easily create web pages

34. clipfish (327) – a video sharing site. Clipfish belongs to the RTL Group

35. mite (324) – a beautiful tool for managing your time

36. playmygame (321) – lets you create your own personalized games

37. a-better-tomorrow (278) – Design Contests + Streetwear + Community

38. piqs (269) – a photo sharing site

39. noserub (248) – a decentralized social network

40. visualorgasm (239) – a design community

41. hitflip (236) – lets you swap your DVDs, CDs, books, and games

42. sevenload (201) – another popular photo and video sharing site

43. kochpiraten (201) – a recipes wiki with social features

44. edelight (195) – a social shopping site with focus on gifts

45. snapmania (195) – an online photo manager

46. dawanda (192) – marketplace and community for handmade goods

47. webnews (192) – a digg-style aggregator

48. lokalisten (186) – a social network

49. amiando (184) – lets you plan events and manage invitations. You also can open a shop and sell tickets for your events

50. mydays (164) – a community about wishes

51. folkd (163) – a Firefox extension which enriches your browsing experience in multiple ways

52. yasni (163) – a people search engine

53. brainr (160) – a tool for social brainstorming

54. mymuesli (157) – lets you mix and buy all-organic cereals

55. dealjaeger (151) – a social shopping site which lets its members hunt for deals

56. spreed (151) – a service for web based conferencing

57. verwandt (147) – lets you create your family tree and stay in contact with your relatives

58. gutefrage (147) – a knowledge community / Q&A site

59. meinprof (147) – lets you rate your college and teachers

60. kindo (144) – also lets you create your family tree and stay in contact with your relatives

61. sudokular (143) – a sudoku community

62. loudblog (142) – lets you easily host podcasts

63. 2video (138) – lets you download videos from many video sites

64. weblin (137) – lets you create an avatar and chat with people visiting the same website

65. stayfriends (134) – search engine and community for finding and staying in touch with former friends

66. dopcast (134) – a community for pod- and vidcasters

67. rivva (133) – a minimalistic but fantastic memetracker

68. knuddels (133) – chat rooms on various topics

69. zpeech (132) – lets you comment any website on the website itself

70. schuelervz (132) – a social network for kids and high school students

71. linklift (123) – marketplace for selling text link ads

72. familyone (120) – photo and video sharing site for families

73. aka-aki (118) – a mobile social network, currently in private beta

74. feedbuddy (116) – lets you find people with similar interests based on common subscribed feeds

75. kwick (111) – a social network

76. jogmap (107) – lets runners add and discuss maps

77. 25peeps (106) – a fun tool to promote your blog

78. doktus (105) – share documents

79. faroo (104) – a distributed peer-to-peer search engine

80. ostube (103) – media CMS which lets you run your own youtube-style community

81. experteer (103) – a platform for jobs

82. utopia (102) – a portal for a green lifestyle

83. mindpicnic (100) – a user driven e-learning site

84. lovelybooks (98) – a community for book lovers

85. icio.de (96) – a social bookmarking site

86. globalzoo (93) – a travel community

87. kinkaa (91) – a travel search engine

88. trivago (90) – travel search and community

89. schutzgeld (87) – a woot-style site

90. atoolo (86) – a web desktop

91. tripsbytips (86) – another travel community

92. projektwerk (86) – a platform for jobs in IT and media

93. reliwa (86) – community for people interested in books and music

94. blauarbeit (86) – marketplace for services

95. mygoya (84) – a webdesktop

96. sprachnudel (83) – a community about words and language

97. imagelooop (81) – lets you create slideshows and widgets from your photos

98. yumondo (79) – site for urban stylesharing

99. bookya (78) – marketplace for students for selling books

100. invyte (77) – lets you organize events and manage invitations

This list is based on counting the number of bookmarks of about 1,000 services from Germany we are aware of at the bookmarking service del.icio.us. While it is hard to find significant metrics for measuring the popularity of sites, it’s even harder to access reliable data for any metric for all sites. Going with del.icio.us is straightforward, but not necessarily an indicator for a large number of active users, traffic or economic potential.

Sites which are available in English do have a competitive advantage at del.icio.us compared to sites which are in German only. Sites which have been around for a while have an advantage compared to services which launched this year or a few weeks ago. A few of the most popular sites in this list are useful and focused but rather smallish tools which attracted a lot of bookmarks because they made it on del.icio.us’ hotlist. The list misses a few popular or interesting services, but overall the heuristics works fine.

On a sidenote: there must be some secret Kool-Aid construktiv GmbH is drinking since they have 5 services in the top 20 (websnapr, mypictr, pixer.us, popuri.us and their flagship Mister Wong.)

Zpeech has put itself on sale on eBay. The service was self-funded, but the developers moved on to Guut.de and other projects, so they “are selling zpeech.com now, because we believe in the idea of a widget for the freedom of zpeech on any website and want to see our baby grow in good and strong hands,” see the auction details here.

The idea of Zpeech is to let people chat or discuss any website on the website itself, but users needed to prefix any URL with zpeech.com/ for their widget to pop up – which is a bit cumbersome and the web is a big place so the chances of serendipically running into an interesting conversation on random pages are low.

Recent eBay exits in Germany include Twitter clone dukudu which sold for €43K a few weeks back, texteln, another Twitter clone, went for 11K and if you remember this week brokr was purchased for 75K.

Zpeech in action

Quickly noted: Hightech Gründerfonds, Neuhaus Partners and hannover innovation fonds have invested in antispameurope, a company which provides spam protection as managed service for private customers and businesses. All customers have to do is to edit their MX-record and antispameurope will take care of filtering out unwanted e-mails, viruses and phishing attempts and happily pass on the rest. The IT department gets a break and the employees can focus on their jobs.

Rumor has it that Alexander Frankenberg and Holger Heinen from the Hightech Gründerfond have been testing the service looking for a solution to their spam problems via the free trial offering and instead of becoming customers became investors. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed.

(via alarm:clock euro)

Back in August I compiled a list of German startups who use Twitter and also wondered why so little use is made leveraging this little tool. Since then the number of German startups using Twitter maybe tripled, but given the plethora of amazing/insightful/overall fantastic mashups and 3rd party apps making use of the Twitter API which have been developed in the past couple of months there has not been a massive amount of creative misuse of Twitter happening here.

Well, today the guys from shoppero – a platform for product reviews with revenue sharing and a strong shopping component (see our coverage) launched TwitterBingo as a pet project for fun and to - quite decently - promote shoppero a bit.

As the name suggests it combines Twitter and the highly addictive game Bingo and whenever you win you twitter “Bingo” and get a $1 coupon for shoppero. I’d love to see more interventions like this.

Corporate Tweet: bingorama

The Semantic Web Group at the Distributed Systems Institute of the University of Hannover has developed a prototype for a new kind of social tagging system named GroupMe!. The idea is to extend flat social tagging systems like del.icio.us or flickr by a group extension which facilitates the extraction of semantics:

a folksonomy is just a collection of tag assignments:
(User, Tag, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag at a particular time.

Over time it is likely that semantics emerge, e.g. tags that are often assigned to same resources may be synonyms. Hence, folksonomies are promising to improve (web) search, etc. With GroupMe!‘s approach of taggable groups we extend tag assignments with a group dimension:
(User, Tag, Group, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag in a certain Group at a particular time.

This extra layer shall provide an improved foundation for search and ranking strategies, for learning relations between tags or for bridging from folksonomies to ontologies.

As is the site is not terribly impressive, you can create a group for a topic and add various resources (links, photos, videos) via drag and drop, move them around, tag them and search or browse the system, get some recommendations of similar tags or export the resources of a group as RDF document for further processing and they probably are going to run into serious usability issues as more groups and tags are added since they currently display all of them. But as mentioned above the site is an early prototype. If you want to take a sneek peak they also have created a 5 minute screencast of the service.

Members of the GroupMe! team are Fabian Abel, Mischa Frank, Nicola Henze, Daniel Krause, Daniel Plappert and Patrick Siehndel.